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I just talked to my sister on the telephone and we agreed that we would leave work and go home early to sit in front of the television because something historic is happening today. There are inklings of information, come right here on DU, that today's election is not even going to be close despite all the polls of "likely voters" that had the electorate divided evenly, 48-48 or some such numbers.
You could begin to sense it over the weekend when early voters began lining up to vote in the blazing sun, for two, three or more hours for their chance to express their -- I'll say it -- frustration and rage at the incompetence and corruption of this administration. People do not wait in lines to vote in order to support the incumbent; they do so for one reason -- to throw the scoundrels out, whoever they may be.
This morning, on television, seeing the lines of people waiting -- waiting for the polling places to open! -- and then the lines of people out of the schools, firehouses and churches, out of the doors, down the blocks, around the corners, of big city neighborhoods and small towns, my mind searched for some parallel.
And then it hit me: the last time I saw this image was ten years ago, when black South Africans and white South Africans were permitted to vote together for the first time and chucked out their own power-mad, secretive, racist, anti-democratic, torturing, war-mongering government. Back then, I had been working on anti-apartheid projects for nearly 15 years and knew many South Africans and envied them for that moment of national purpose and good will and reconciliation through the simple act of voting.
Today, I feel for ourselves what I felt for my South African friends.
I live in probably the safest Democratic electoral district in the country -- southeast Queens, sometimes considered the most middle class black neighborhood in the nation -- not rich, not poor, but incredibly middle. In my Congressional District, the Democratic representative typically gets 98% of the vote. The 6th Congressional District is notable because fringe parties like the Greens or even the Socialist Workers Party typically get more votes than the Republicans. If ever there was a district where Democrats might not be motivated to vote because their district was safe, it would be the 6th Congressional District.
Yet this morning, there was a long line to get into the local school. There was an air of celebration, of an early morning, before work block party. I have moved back to my old neighborhood after living all over the place for decades, and I voted in my first elementary school, where I went to kindergarten, my girlfriend in her early morning nurses uniform, by my side. When they opened "the book" for me to sign, I saw my mother's signature. My mother passed away three years ago, but her signature was still in the voter registation book. She had been a school aid at that school, a union organizer and a second mother to generations of kids at that school. My father had been a civil servant for the city as well. The school, the signature, my memories of neighborhood kids greeting my mother throughout her life brought home to me the humble and magnificent nature of our civic culture: the school, the neighborhood, the eldlerly volunteer election workers, the teachers, the nurses, the police officer standing guard over the voters. This is what makes us not just Americans but peculiarly Democrats -- the idea that we can work together for the common good and we decide what is good and common through the humble procedure of talking together and then casting our vote. And this is what the Republicans of today hate -- the idea that there can be any public sphere, any help that is not self-help, any activity that is not driven by greed, rather than concern for the common good. To them, each on their own island, there can be no civic and civil community.
I voted and my girlfriend voted. I handed her our voter registration materials which had arrived in the mail just a few weeks before (we had to change addresses) and I joked that these are not voter registration cards, but eviction notices: We want to keep copies of our eviction papers, which we served on George W. Bush and his would be empire builders, to move out of the People's House and back to Texas, where he can cut brush to his heart's content on his little island of a ranch.
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