It’s 7:10 a.m. and Kathy just called me on her cell phone. She left the house just before 7 in the hopes of casting her vote on her way to school and being done with it. Silly girl! Kathy drove past Mount Pleasant City Hall to find the parking lot completely jammed, cars parked out on the street, and an enormous line of people stretching nearly to the street. So she’ll be coming back after school instead – and I warned her that she is likely to confront similar lines then, if not worse. But that’s okay. She’ll bring a book along (maybe Sudoku) and take whatever time is required to cast her vote in this momentously important election.
I already voted just over a week ago. I did so because today I head to Chicago to attend the opera- and there will be absolutely no time in my schedule at all for voting. So I went a week ago yesterday and stood in line behind three people to cast my absentee ballot. It was weird not to be standing in line with dozens or even hundreds of my fellow citizens, although the in-and-out quickness of the transaction was sort of nice. But what I missed the most was the sense that I was part of something simultaneously unfolding across the country. It’s a bit like the highly fragmented nature of television-watching these days. Once upon a time there were three or four channels and there was much more of a sense of shared experience with television on those occasion when millions of us were perched in front of the set, together watching something important like the last episode of M*A*S*H. Now with literally hundreds of channels available to most of us plus VCRs and TIVO and other technologies that allow us to watch what we want when we want to watch it. That’s a little bit like what this absentee voting felt like to me.
But it did not really matter to me in the end because it was far more important for me to vote than to get that warm and fuzzy feeling of voting with the masses. Evidently, my dad and Sonja felt the same way because they told us the other night that they went and voted the very first day it was possible to do so. They have been chomping at the bit to vote for their candidate and I can sort of imagine them all-but breaking the door down to cast their votes for their man.
I guess what matters more than standing in long lines today- although that really can and should be a moving experience- is to think about the long line of Americans through the generations before us who have cast their votes. . . . some in log structures with quill pens, I’m guessing. . . . for the sake of this flawed masterpiece of a nation called the United States. The ballots may look different – and we now have George Stephanopolos pointing to an electronic map lit up in red and blue – and some of the issues we face are very different (although some are pretty much exactly the same) but we are part of a Long Line of Americans exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidates of their choice. And that’s the coolest thing of all.
One way things have changed dramatically is in what we are willing to listen to. Recently I interviewed Eric Lehrmann about his book “Lincoln in Peoria” which talks about a dramatic speech which Lincoln gave in Peoria, Illinois in 1854- the first great speech he gave in opposition to slavery. The speech lasted three hours and ten minutes- and a crowd of hundreds stood there willingly and took it all in. And it wasn’t three hours of sound bytes and catchy slogans. It was three hours of relentless logic and careful argument. It may be easy to think of the Americans of the mid nineteenth century as somewhat amusing, with their butter churns, but I find myself both awestruck and envious . . . . and honored to be one small, insignificant American in that long line of Americans who have cast their votes over the years for whoever they believed would most ably lead our nation.
pictured: in the midst of casting my absentee ballot. It’s actually more complicated to do it this way than to vote on Election Day, but the folks working there were very helpful and even dopey me was able to do it right, I think.