Voting

On her blog, my friend Trisha recently wrote a post about her voting experience. Her comments stirred my own thinking about the subject.

I have always been a pretty casual voter. I hit the major elections, but am very random about voting in the "off-season" local elections and run-offs. Mostly this is because I haven't done my homework and don't know much about the candidates in either party. It is always a discomfiting moment to stand in the voter booth and be required to choose a candidate for whom to vote when you don't know one single thing about any of them--it's like a very bad scantron test moment, where one of the bubbled answers is possibly very right or is possibly very wrong, and the circle you bubble in with your #2 pencil might just have as easily been chosen with your eyes open or closed. (Maybe I'm disclosing too much about my test-taking skills here).

I digress.

I cast my vote on Friday for both the presidential and current state/city elections, and I was moved by the experience. Believe me, it had nothing to do with the setting--I was in a crowded line in a crowded grocery store, with one eye on the clock because I only had a very few minutes and one eye on the voting booths, so that I could quickly slide into the next available opening.

The machines have changed since my last voting experience. Everything has gone high-tech (no hanging chads here), and it was just complicated enough to give one pause--which is not a bad thing when one is casting a vote for the next president.

What a privilege it is to vote. What a glorious moment it is to have a voice--even a tiny one emanating from the line of a crowded grocery store in regular-old-town U.S.A. What this privilege means to so many around the world who are denied this right is unknowable by me, a gal who has the right to be casual--or not--about the entire voting experience, and who has never suffered under the tyranny of repression or oppression.

I placed my "I Voted" sticker on my jacket and left the grocery store with a renewed sense of determination to do more than just vote. When this election (and all the hoopla) is over, what will really matter is not that I cast a vote--but that I work in big and small ways in my own circle of influence to make lives better and to shine light into dark places, especially the dark places that live within me. Voting is one way to do that, but it lives among a million other ways to let my voice be heard.

So go vote; and when it's all over, and it will be soon, keep talking, keep working, keep helping, keep mending, keep planting, and keep harvesting. Keep your voice alive.

Jana