My local polling place is a magical setting, the lifeguard station on Venice Beach. I always enjoy the walk by water's edge whether before or after work. You could have rolled a bowling ball though it on Tuesday and not hit a voter. The pundits blamed election fatigue but the problem seems to go deeper ...
I spent time chatting with the volunteer poll workers and asked how many of my neighbors had showed. Attendance of registered voters at that point was all of eleven percent. Of eligible voters it was closer to three percent. Yes, I’ve missed elections, both inadvertently. To me voting has been a precious right. My grandparents fled to America because they couldn’t vote. All were born in a land where their language wasn’t taught in the schools and they had no hand in self-government. They were raised in a country that had ceased to exist, Poland, which had been carved up by Russia, Prussia (Germany) and Austria. My grandmother told me tales of fleeing Poland as a child with her family, trudging all night to duck police, sleeping in barns during the day to make her way to a ship that would take her here. Her future husband fled induction into the Russian army to sail to New York. He saw the statue of Liberty with nineteen cents in his pocket and a can of sardines. My other grandfather had already settled here after serving in the Russian army when World War I broke out. He joined the Polish army of expatriates assembling in Canada and as a cavalry officer went back to fight for Polish freedom. Decorated and quickly promoted on the battlefield, he actually saw Poland reemerge as a free country before returning to the United States to raise his family. My father was originally 4F in World War II because of bad kidneys. He flushed himself with water for days, went back to the draft board claiming the physical was in error and landed in Europe in time to fight the Battle of the Bulge. In 1960, he campaigned with my mother for our Senator, a fellow vet. We saw John F. Kennedy reach the White House.
I was raised to treasure the act of voting. I was introduced as a child to the mysteries of the voting booth. Behind the musty curtain my mother showed me how to flick the levers, then register your choices with the big pull that ticked the numbers into memory and opened the curtain to the next voter. As a Boy Scout I did volunteer work for the League of Women Voters. Through the streets of my Boston neighborhood, I campaigned for friends and fathers of friends who ran for office.
In the late sixties a movement grew in this country to extend the franchise to teenagers so that before we were called upon to fight for our country we would be allowed to vote. As a way to win the support of eighteen year olds, as the twenty-sixth amendment passed, the draft was ended. Despite my low lottery number, I didn’t have to fight in a war that was wrong, yet I had been prepared to do so as the cost I would have paid to earn my rights as a US citizen. No longer facing mandatory military service, I cast my first vote for a decorated Army Air Force Pilot who had flown thirty-five combat missions and knew the difference between a necessary war and one that was a mistake, George McGovern. My vote mattered.
We no longe value voting because it is too easy. We take it for granted. It is embarrassing and pathetic when Los Angeles voters stay home while just a couple of weeks ago Iraqis braved guns and death threats to flock to polls. Despite a Sunni boycott 2/3 of them voted. Where were we Tuesday, watching TV?
Posted by: Paul_M._J._Suchecki on Friday, March 11, 2005 - 08:47 PM
