There aren’t many polling places out where I live. I was going to have to mosey on down to where the “civilized” people roam to cast my primary ballot. So I saddled up and rode into town last night. My plan was to get up early Tuesday morning, be waiting at the door when the polls opened, ink my votes, and then get the hell outta Dodge before anybody even realized I was there.
As I rode down the main drag in the cold night air, I saw a bunch of kids standing on a street corner, all of them waving large, homemade Barack Obama signs. It was a clear-eyed and optimistic effort to shore up support, maybe even change the minds of those passersby who found themselves wavering between the uncomfortable norm and the shock of the new. After all, can there be anything less frightening than youthful idealism? And here, before me, stood the unspoiled virgin voters of the United States…people young enough to have an unsullied and unwavering faith in the American political system…believing that their belief is enough to change to world. I was once one of those kids myself, though I’d be ashamed to admit the name of the guy to whom I lost my virginity. Suffice it to say it didn’t go well. He was a loser in more ways than one.
To me, these kids embody the dream of that “more perfect union” I once shared…a reverie that has long since slipped beyond my reach no matter how strong the desire to close my eyes on reality and keep on dreaming. They believe in Barack Obama and his message. And they believe their hard work can get him elected despite an enormous machine that is working in the opposite direction, threatening to crush their naïve optimism like the tanks of Tiananmen Square. Perhaps most importantly, they believe that President Barack Obama will be able to change this country, and that is what this election is truly about.
It’s easy to write these kids off. They are inexperienced at best and adolescent at worst. Still, it's tough to forget the sage council of Dr. Robert Zimmerman when he prescribed that “he not busy being born is busy dying.” The good doctor was all of twenty-four years old when he penned that line. And it should prove to warn that this country hasn’t been born in a long, long time. You can call the youth “idealistic” or even “dreamers,” and you would be correct. But remember that idealism is rooted not in the way things are, but the way things ought to be. To castigate the idealist is to embrace the greater fallacy that society, as it's come to be, is working out just fine.
So perhaps it’s fitting that I woke up this morning with another of Dr. Zim's tunes in my head. As I walked down to the polling place, the cold morning sun paying fine compliment to the icy air stinging at my lungs, my boot heels hit the pavement in time with the music in my mind.
I want you
I want you
I want you so bad…
I hit the polls just as the doors swung open. There were three others there ahead of me, no doubt dreaming the same dream. But it was what happened next that is truly the stuff of fantasy. For the first time in my life, I voted for someone.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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Congratulations. I hope it was worth the trip down from the prairie.
I had the exact opposite experience this morning, yet it engendered similarly warm, optimistic feelings. On the way to the subway, I, too, was greeted with the smiles and support of Obama supporters, shivering from the mild chill and the slight drizzle in the air, passing out colored fliers and wearing buttons. Yet these weren't children, teenagers, or even twentysomethings--these beaming faces belonged to a handful of over-fifty urban dwellers.
Upon approaching the public school in Brooklyn where I was about to vote, the demographic aged a little more, and got more specific. This was a neighborhood I used to live in (only a few subway stops from where I presently live), and it's made up of African-American families, many of them living there since the Sixties. And those enrolled at my voting district are greatly African-Americans of a certain age. Entering the lobby filled with the huge metal voting booths (metal contraptions with arduous levers that promise to soon be extinct...but oh how that final click of the gear locking into place gives a dramatic sense of finality!), I was surrounded by a bustling enthusiasm...save for the teenage volunteer worker, these were elderly African-Americans, and if their own excitement was likely more tempered than that of the youngsters you encountered on the West Coast it's probably only because of the weight of lived experience on their shoulders. Though we shouldn't let race be the deciding factor in this, well, race, it's also unavoidably stirring to see the black community, made up of so many who lived through the Civil Rights movement, casting their vote not just for the first plausible African-American presidential candidate but also for one who seems able to inspire great swathes of people.
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