I have done my civic duty

Today I voted. It was remarkable for two reasons: It's the first time I've voted anything close to a straight Democratic ticket, and it's the first time I've voted in a presidential election when it wasn't the first Tuesday of November. Let's hope I don't have to do anything so radical again.

It was a beautiful day here in Wichita, Oct. 28 and the lines were snaking through the corridors at the Presbyterian church. We all showed up thinking to avoid the rush, and thereby created the rush a week early. No matter. We were mostly in good spirits. Long lines are bad, but this wasn't the DMV, we didn't have to be there. We showed up because we're good citizens, doing our duty, and it doesn't hurt to have friends and neighbors seeing us do it.

We shuffled forward every minute or so, looking at our watches and thinking back on all the TV ads and debates and all those cards and fliers that have come in the mail. We thought about who was the terrorist, and who was the crook and who was soft on crime and who twice declared bankruptcy and who failed to pay taxes and who has been guilty of unseemly behavior. We thought about who supported the Iraq war and who sat down with a '60s radical and who spent way too much on a makeover and who reacted the wrong way to a dumb question.

Then we got in front of that touch screen and we voted on the issues. Well, except for those judge races, where they could all be closet jihadists or John Wayne Gacy and we'd never know the difference. You see the name, and you see the space below that says "Write in," and you think, write in what? We'll give them a shot. If they were pure evil, we'd have heard about it, right?

So now I've voted, and now I'm tuning out the presidential race, and all the state races and all the local races too. I'm just tuning them the hell out. I'll tune back in next Tuesday.

Comments

Unknown said…
Amen.

Although I'm not old enough to vote, I can't stand the constant bombardment of political ads. After seeing it the twentieth time I start to forget who it's even about.

On commercial breaks it's like they run a loop. Starting with the state-level guys, both sides, then congressional people, then presidency. And then we're back to the show.

I can't wait till it's over.
October 29, 2008 at 9:25 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine ...
Read more

A farewell to copy

Image
On Friday I walked out of a newspaper building as an employee for the last time. During the stroll to the far end of the parking lot, I did a brief review of my career. Here's the high point: I've worked at newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes. And the low point: None of those Pulitzers were won while I was working at the newspapers in question. Hey, I'm sure that's just bad timing. Of the half dozen papers I worked for, the best was the Philadelphia Inquirer. The worst was the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. When you enter the cavernous newsroom of the Inquirer, you pass by a wall festooned with pictures of reporters and editors who have won Pulitzers. It is a measure of my love of journalism that when I looked at these pictures, I usually reflected not on the prize-winning stories they reported, but on the clothes they were wearing. Look at them: All these gifted journalists, photographed at the very apex of their careers, and most of them are dressed like t...
Read more

Wall Street and Willa Cather

Image
I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$...
Read more