Can One Survive in a No-ID Landscape?

 Around fifteen years ago, I had a young airman who approached me on a research paper he had to write for a college class.  The subject had to approach the topic of mandatory IDs for voting.   So in a thirty-minute period, we had this discussion, and he picked at my brain to understand at the full implications.

In the end, I made this argument....maybe up until the 1960s....you could have survived without an ID in America.  You could walk up to a airline ticket desk....buy the ticket with cash, and walk through a terminal to board a plane....going anywhere in America you desired.

Even through the 1960s....to buy booze, people just looked at you and as long as you looked '18'....no one said a word. 

In most states, you could have walked into a driver's license bureau....told them the story that you'd never had a license and then done the test with some friend's car.

I offered the observation that somewhere in the late 1970s....things became more complicated.  

In the 1980s....all of these identification situations started to come up.  In a number of states...you would be constantly challenged on drinking ages.  Some states made serious laws on buying cigarettes only at 18 or above.  

Trying to get certain prescription drugs?  That eventually became a problem.  

I walked into a Wal-Mart around 2002 during a visit to the US and found a particular cough syrup which was effective (extremely effective)....but to purchase it....I had give the lady my driver's license and she input the number into the system. 

There was a time where the entire population of Tennessee could survive without an ID.  But that time has come to pass now.  You can't make it without an ID.

So these arguments I see with the judges trying to suggest it's wrong to require an ID for voting purposes....I'd ask them to go for 100 days and try to survive without an ID in this bold new world.  You can't make it without an ID.  Those trying to make this argument?  They are still living in the 1960s/1970s, and pretending that we still exist in that landscape, but we've actually moved on.