Voting

I voted yesterday. Yes, a Sunday afternoon in October, not the first Tuesday of November. What a change from my first vote in a Presidential election. (Way) Back then, I was a wife, mother of a toddler, and living in rural NW PA. To vote, we went to the township hall? fire station? (the distance of years has fuzzied the memory) Into a huge metal box, pull the lever to pull the curtain behind me, then push down smaller levers to vote for individual candidates. In other small towns, voting was by punching a card with a stylus - long before I knew to worry about hanging my chads.  This time, voting was touch screen. Show ID, sign name and initial, receive a voter card. Something like checking in at a hotel front desk and receiving a credit card size room key, complete with printed arrow to indicate direction to insert into slot on the voting machine. First a choice of language, then a page of instructions. Touch the box: Continue. Sets of names with party affiliation appear under each office. President, Senate, Congress, Sheriff, Constable, Judge, Rail road commissioner....

Touch a box to mark my choice, review all my votes and I have one more chance to change my mind. No, looks like everything is marked the way I intended. Now, one more touch and I have officially cast my ballot. Back at the sign in desk, I toss my used voter card in a basket and pick up a sticker out of another. Over the Presidential Seal is the proclamation: I voted. 

This makes the 6th state in which I've voted, from rural to urban communities, in school hallways, town libraries, church gyms, and the lobby of a nursing home. Neighbors and strangers drawn to an appointed time and place, the shared experience of civic decision-making, an exercise in idealism based on the expectation that our vote - as we intended, as we cast it - will indeed count - and be counted as we intended.    

I voted for change. I voted for hope. I voted for the idea of the United States as a nation we should be, as we could be. My heart has been broken again and again by the cronyism, incompetence, greed, and perversion of justice of the last 8 years. Outrage has welled up again and again: Iraq, Katrina, Halliburton/Blackwater, DOJ, Rove-Cheney .... Lost lives, lost jobs, lost health, lost minds, lost homes, lost justice, lost ideals ....  But now, maybe, just maybe, we're ready as a nation to vote for the best interests of the whole community, to begin the adult work of cleaning up the mess of our national self-indulgence in fear, greed and division. I've been distressed before by election results but managed to maintain confidence in the long-term national wisdom of finding the center again after swinging too far to one side or the other. I hope ... I pray, that we will do so once again. Yes. We. Can.