2004-11-02 - 9:49 a.m.
I voted
Thank god for daylight savings time because I woke up early and voted. The past few weeks I've been struggling to get out of bed because i would wake up and it would still be dark. But since we get to fall back, I wake up when the sun rises. Hooray! So I get to the polls at 7:15 and there's a line down the block. As I have voted absentee year after year, I have no way of knowing whether this is a usual thing or not. As I find out, it isn't. Everyone is talking about turnout. I live in a particularly diverse part of DC where gentrification is hitting so there are equal numbers of blacks and non-blacks at the polls. I wait in line for 45 minutes, chatting with others in line and reading the paper. Everyone is blown away by the turnout and somehow noone is grumpy. The PTA of the school in which we are voting is having a bake sale, taking advantage of the captive audience. What's funny is that everyone seems to be interested in helping. Those of us closer to the front of the lines play a game of telephone to the people at the back of the line, letting people know that the lines splits up alphabetically. We tell people that if you are H-O or P-Z, you can move into the much shorter line.
There's something momentous happening. Maybe it's just my neighborhood but you feel people are coming together. You see your neighbors. You chat with strangers. You buy a muffin from the PTA. No matter what party or ideology, you are an enfranchised American. Because noone cares about a district that will go overwhelmingly Democratic, noone is stopping ANY of us from voting. And the thing is, we ARE voting. A lot of us. In the most ignored part of the country when it comes to electoral politics. Our votes count even when we all know where our electoral votes go.
