About to post my absentee ballot: I've got that demo-crazy look in my eyes.
I love voting. I love everything about it. In Alaska, we get a real paper ballot that we can write on and everything, and it feels great, like filling in the bubble on an SAT question you know you’ve got the right answer to.
Except that for the last eight years, I’ve been getting the answers wrong. As an Alaskan liberal (keep your laws off my body; bring on the universal health care, gay marriage, and gun control) I can usually guarantee that what I’m for, my state’s against, and vice versa. So for me, voting has been about taking my constitutional rights out for a spin, just to make sure they still run. Afterward, I listen to the returns on KBBI. Homer votes to legalize marijuana, but everyone else on the peninsula says no.
Voting against George W. Bush was even worse. My vote was just as irrelevant within my state, but there was the added outrage that my state’s three electoral votes would make no difference in the outcome of the election. This was a paradoxical outrage: if they had mattered, if my state had made the difference between Bush and not-Bush, I would have imploded. But still, I don’t like feeling impotent.
Even though my vote doesn’t matter, in almost as many ways as it is possible for a vote not to matter, I was excited to vote for Al Gore in 2000 (my first presidential election as a voter — imagine my dismay when that election was criminally stolen) and grimly satisfied to vote against Bush in 2004. (My 2004 vote was very much an “against” vote.) I get all happy when I vote. I feel a lifting sensation in my heart and in my head. I think that might be what Republicans mean when they talk about Freedom!, but I don’t know if it’s the same thing — it doesn’t make me want to go out and bomb people. To me, it’s like a taste of an ideal world in which everyone’s vote does matter. The natural extension of voting is a society in which 1 human being = 1 human being. I only wish we could do it more often.
That skippy feeling usually wears off, and I start thinking that it’s a damn good thing the people of the United States don’t get their say about everything, because there are a lot of selfish, cruel, bigoted idiots out there waiting for the chance to abuse their power.
I got the chance to vote for a presidential candidate last week. I mailed my absentee ballot on Monday, Nov. 3, from a tiny post office in upstate New York. My vote was simultaneously against and for. I voted against the shortsighted, discriminatory, power-hungry, violent, corrupt, hate-filled, lying, contemptuous filth that has been stinking up the White House and our country and seeping out into the world for the last eight years. It felt good. And I voted for equality, reason, compassion, honesty, change and hope.
And last night, Nov. 4 and into Nov. 5, I watched as our country got together and voted. I was so nervous. I guess I was feeling pretty confident, but I was feeling confident when the news organizations called Florida for Gore in 2000, and then everything went to hell. So I had a couple of beers and obsessively watched NPR’s election map for reason to hope. As it became clear that Obama would win, I felt so lucky to have gotten the chance to join with so many other people to vote for the United States of America’s first black president. How fucking cool.
And now I still cannot believe it’s actually true. It wasn’t taken from us. THEY’re not refusing to count our votes. THEY’re not insisting that our votes be recounted. The better candidate won, because he was better, and smarter, and more honorable, and he listened and understood what the people wanted. It feels like the world has been turned right-side up again. The candidate who made sense won.
Now I’m sounding all triumphant and idealistic, but my vote for Obama was a qualified one. I don’t agree with him on everything. I’m not really interested in pursuing “clean coal” as an energy source; I think that’s an oxymoron. I really don’t like the way he and Biden won’t come out in favor of gay marriage, but instead pander to the bigots with “civil union,” which is just “separate but equal,” drinking fountains for black and white, all over again. And I think our voting system and our government itself are deeply flawed, and that voting is just the very tiniest beginning of what a person should do to affect change in the world. And I understand that Obama will compromise, and do it all the time, and I may not be too happy with him in the end. I understand that.
But in the middle of the doomiest doom that ever did doom, Obama spoke to the American people, to me, with respect. I don’t need to tell you how good that feels after eight years of being lied to and spoken to with contempt, as though 1 human being = 1 tool to be manipulated. I think that’s a fantastic start to a presidency. I think the Obama administration shows every sign of being ready to listen to the people.
So now I’m going to sit down and write a letter explaining why they need to change their position on gay marriage.
After a long musical fast, I’ve been trying to catch up with newish music. I’m starting with artists and bands I’m already acquainted with and branching out. It’s not as easy without my own personal CD-ordering service, with stacks of whatever I please arriving every Wednesday to my door, but I’m working on it.
