My just happened experience is giving me this stream of consciousness, so I hope it makes sense to you.
I went into the polling station armored to do battle at the ballot box, with headphones and Pandora. When I handed my completed ballot to the operator and began walking out, the song playing was My Prerogative. I’m not kidding.
This election season, I am not telling anyone to vote for anyone. I will say this; if you chose to vote for someone out of anger over another candidate or official, you’re no different than the other side.
My election record is in tact; I have never missed an election since I was 18. And it looks like the people at my polling booth didn’t miss out either, because that sucker was so full, I had to fill out my ballot (and yes, Oakland has paper ballots) bending over a chair.
I cannot tell people this season to vote for anyone, because at this point, I am tired of telling people how stupid they are for not voting. Blacks, when not banned from voting due to slave status, were excluded by a myriad of laws and regulations which followed. When not officially being barred from voting, were rejected with little tricks like, say, moving the polling places. If that isn’t enough to get you out of the home, knowing that people have been threatened with violence, incarceration, physical intimidation, assault, and have been murdered to curb their right to vote, and you dumb asses find some inane, obscure, phony, piece of crap circular barbershop armchair chat room analysis to nullify the process is beyond me. And you don’t even need to leave your home anymore; just mail in the sucker….
You’re simply too stupid to have a conversation with, at any level, about governance and social responsibility. You are the people that drop your kids off to school late, with no breakfast, ill prepared for class, and then expect someone else to develop your kid.
As I walked to the polling place, I could see people walking upstream; a black woman who appeared to be in her 70’s, looked at me and yelled through the sounds of my headset, “go vote.” Now I said I have never missed an election; I have advised people in every election over the last 25 years about policy, or message, or voter strategy; I have volunteered since I was 18, and I have run for office. Never. Missed. A. One. Person. Special. Primary. Yet, when this person who appeared to have that history of activism and a wealth of intellect—you know when you run into someone and you now they can regale you with institutional history for hours—told me what to do without having any sense of where I was coming from; it made me angry for a brief moment. I figured out that the anger I had was stored in a place in which I felt that she was assuming that I wouldn’t do the right thing, that she had to tell me how to act. It was like that feeling when someone is following you around in the store, when the most expensive thing is $40, and you have $1,000 in your pocket.
I then started to wonder if voting this season was in vogue, kinda like, “hey man, you know you need to go check out that movie________ or you’re not really black…” I felt as if she was questioning something about me, and I didn’t think she earned the right to check me. I smiled halfheartedly and kept moving. I went to the voting station, and I saw a ton of people in my neighborhood that made me think I was living in Marin County. It was WHITE, and that goofy white (I know you all know what I mean, even white people), and they were unorganized and disheveled and didn’t know exactly where to stand or what to do, and all I could do was look at them, turn up the sound on my phone, find a special place in my heart and start voting. It was like like they were on a company work lunch and they all were ordering soul food for the first time, and they couldn’t read the menu, yet they were excited and confused all at the same time, and they were keeping me away from getting my oxtail order, and I was afraid that they might slip up and get the last one by mistake ahead of me.
I will say this; I have never seen a more sadly sponsored ballot with the least qualified candidates for office in my life. I have seen more quality in elections at Montera, when it was a Junior High School, and far superior at Oakland Tech and UC Berkeley. And I mean that from Governor on down; there are so many ill prepared people to manage the affairs of the 21st century, including the incumbents. We can’t even be sure that they will surround themselves with smart people. It’s like The Little Rascals or The Three Stooges, where the most intelligent goof, if elected, is going to be layered with incompetents. I cannot in good conscience truly demand that people check the box of the brightest dullard.
But it still matters; it matters in a way that it perhaps has never mattered before, and that’s the scariest part of it all. We need the right people in now.
We have an intolerant nation. We have had a prosperous Nation.
But never had we had both at the same time.
In the 1850’s America was more intolerant than it is now; white people were willing to wage war with their white relatives for the right to own black people. In the 1860’s, they did. But in our worse examples of inhumanity in this country, there was always some excuse that we needed to be cruel because it was about saving ourselves first. It was kill or be killed. Even in the worst human atrocity of the 20th century in Germany, Hitler was able to take a depression and hyperinflation and turn it into scapegoating and almost massacre an entire ethnicity in Jews. But what is our ‘excuse?’ Why is it that people are making money now, that they have jobs, they have everything they wanted on their side: President, Congress, Supreme Court, Big Church, Big Business; but they are angry, selfish, and afraid?
We once wanted your tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to break free. Two years ago, we didn’t want bad Mexicans or any Muslims. Last year, we didn’t want shithole country blacks. Now, we don’t want anybody. They are coming to take our money and our white women. Ok, there have been times in America when we didn’t want people—those people—to come to this nation. Benjamin Franklin wanted this country to only include the whites and the lovely reds, with the exclusion of the ‘tawnys’ from Mediterranean Europe; The Irish Potato Famine, Chinese Exclusion Act, the Red Scare are examples. But I don’t recall in any other period that we were as needy as we are of labor, while rejecting everyone else at the boarders. And why the hate?
We also have abandoned, for the first time in the 9 decades after WWII, the goal of working to improve the conditions of other nations around the world, even if the reasons were selfish to America: to improve their ability to be our trading partners, and to make their countries stable enough to keep their citizens from trying to move to ours. Forget those other reasons like being a world leader, to prevent war, to keep people from being radicalized or rejecting democratic values, etc. Sometimes it was just smart to make sure that your neighbor could eat too.
That is all gone. America doesn’t care anymore.
No infrastructure plans.
No plans for investment.
No plans for conservation.
No plans for development.
No long-range plans for improvement of any kind.
No international mission.
No humanitarian plans.
No immigration reforms planned in Congress.
As much as I wanted to stay home, because as a policy snob, this is truly a horrific scene, like going to Coppola’s winery and pretending that the people around you have good taste, when you understand that they are there drinking and loving the wines because it’s a celebrity winery rather than a good one, and; I digress…..if you feel like the Niles Crane of the election season, don’t feel bad, you have a Frasier in me shaking my head in contempt back in your direction at these simpletons. Snobbery aside, this is perhaps why today is so important; THEY have made it unappetizing to vote. If they make it as ugly as possible, you will simply swipe right your freedoms away. Do not fall for it; of the 40 things on the ballot, if you get just a handful right, it will have made the difference.
The next song that played on my Pandora was The Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger.
Big Brother Pandora is a genius.
holowe 