I vote in the presidential elections, but usually skip the midterm elections.
So why did I join the voters today?
Officium vocat. (Duty calls.)
Tonight on the news, we will see film clips of urban voters standing in long lines that snake out the door. Shivering in the cold, they will make cheerful remarks about their determination to vote. I am a grumpy voter: like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, I would turn around and go home if the line were too long. The difference: he would pretend to have voted! I would deliver a tedious monologue on the angst of voting.
This year I was sick: but I voted anyway. I admit, the Dems have disappointed me in the last two years, but the alternative is much worse. Aside from arming the Ukraine with weapons, a morally ambiguous move at best, the government has accomplished little since 2021. They have done nada for the environment, nada for women’s rights, as good as nada for gun control, and under their watch, Trump’s Supreme Court has revoked Roe v. Wade.
The Republican agenda is so over-the-top that I could not in good conscience stay away from the polls. The Repubs campaign relentlessly against abortion, pass fetal heartbeat laws, draft bills to ban books and send teachers to prison for assigning Y.A. books, want to crush Affirmative Action, deprive public schools and universities of funding, and what next? Perhaps a bill to deprive women and Blacks of voting rights? I would not be surprised.
There was no line. There were three ID checkers, who scanned the IDs and gave us receipts, which we handed over at another table to get our ballots, and then we sat in a cubicle and filled in rectangles next to the Dem. candidates’ names.
I voted, because I don’t want to live in It Can’t Happen Here, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.
And so I voted. It can’t hurt. It might help.
Good luck! We should know the results by 10 or 11 p.m., yes?
