The Nobility of the Vote: a guided meditation on election day

The phone is ringing. The newspaper is still in its plastic bag on the driveway. Nobody is home - you woke up late. The world has started without you, voting without you. You'll still get to work on time, but the most important decision of the day will wait 10 hours until you can get to 38 Pepperdock Lane tonight.

It feels good not to care as you floss at a stop light in your car: like a chemical release erasing the memory of the ads and stories wasting the mental space that could be used on self-tailored entertainment. I can't miss my twitter, my facebook, my sweet YouTube. Not for you, Laura Demlady, Joseph A. Reformingman! Green light.

What will happen if I don't vote? I'm not informed adequately anyway. It's just a sedative to make me believe that I hold power in a dysfunctional system. 


At work, no one says a thing. The coffee machine sounds its finish from the break room; Aaron, Lisa and Ron get up and file toward the sound. You split between reviewing emails form your boss and skimming local political news and blogs.

"Hello _____," says your boss over the cubicle wall. It's an open office. You smile, craving a moment of wall-scriven absurdity on facebook.

"Good morning."
"Did you vote this morning?"
"Not yet."
"You should do that tonight. I'll check in on that ________ project after lunch, OK?"
"Great. Thanks," you nod. Screw voting. Coffee is your need now.

11a.m. You've dozed off in a post-french-roast crash. People, citizens surround you in their booths, little pencils in hand. A finger pokes your back; you turn around to see a ten-year-old smiling broadly. The child holds a sign reading "SUNSHINE is the best disinfectant." Zip code, S.S. #, connected arrows. Sun shines through the skylight of the gym at Pepperdock Elementary school, and you start weeping. Then a distinct thought "For the raindrop, joy is entering the river." A Rumi quote from french roast? Did you ever wake up this morning? Are you really at work? Are you a Democrat or a Republican?


Lunch brings you out of that pseudo-dream with a dull PB&J and a saccharine bottle of mango-peach juice.

"I like Asiago," says Ron across the lunch table.
"No, Steven Jenright is my guy - my kids need a real education." You don't have kids. Maybe you won't vote for him.
"Laura Demlady has 20 years of experience as a real estate lawyer. And she's a decent person."
"What does that even mean, decent? Reformingman listens to his constituents," responds Lisa.

Your colleagues have already voted. They ask you - for whom did you vote?
"No one, yet. I'm going tonight."
"Oh, good luck with that. The polls are a nightmare after work."

Unless you don't go.


Only an hour more at the office. A window open to facebook rests next to ten or more political blogs. The review went well - ________, Inc. is happy, even glowing, over your performance. If you had kids, or even a spouse, this'd be good news for them. A raise is coming.

A candy bar commercial runs through your head, and sticky caramel with cookie crunch and nougat and chocolate calls to you in fantastic contrast to the fluourescent-lit afternoon of high, dry achievement. The vending machine is full of choices - A5, B6, C2, D8, F4, B7 - choices you can barely decipher in your desire for them. The gummy strawberries have vitamins A, C, and E. The creme-filled crackers remind you of your grandparents' house. The trail mix would fill you up. The chocolate bar would bring that zany commercial to life, but leave you crashing while driving home - sleep behind the wheel is too dangerous. Your dollar sneaks back into your pocket, and the next 45 minutes lead you in and out of various e-published assessments of candidates Laura, Joe, Steven and Asiago the Independent. Why don't political candidates change their names like celebrities? Nobody should run under the name of a cheese!, you assert incredulously.

"Huh? Did you say something?" asks your cube-neighbor.

It's time to go - home or vote?

"Oh, good night, Dameon! See you tomorrow!" You buy a candy bar from the machine on your way out of the building.


At home, sunlight spills through the kitchen window where you stand. Your dog stares at you. Your roommates are out. Your brother calls, but you don't pick up. You notice yourself becoming transfixed with an ant crawling along the top of the dish rack when the neighbors across the street picks up her Demlady sign from the lawn and floors it out of the driveway. You run out and ask if you can hop in, feeling like a 12-year-old and a fugitive.

"Uh, OK," she says. You get in; you will vote.


At the booth, a wave of chocolate-cookie-caramel-nougat-induced exhaustion hits you. You exhale, blogs dogging your consciousness.

What a load of nonsense. What a patriotic sap. What a political pansy you are, trying to say no to well-earned apathy in the face of a bullying system. Blog, schmog. You're a person with your own parties to go to - conservative and liberal labels don't mean anything. You won't even be categorized as an independent. Independents just undermine the success of people who are going to bomb each other to political pieces, anyway. YOUR news is that you have a real li- OWW!


You're on the floor rubbing your ass. Two kids are playing tag at the polls, one having just knocked your knees from under you.

"But I was bored, Mom! This place stinks."

"I know, hon, I know. Someday you'll be the one getting knocked down, though, and then you'll realize what a pain in the butt you're being right now."

Your neighbor stands by the exit as the mother and son skirmish past her. You fill out your choices, hand it in and leave with her.

"Who did you vote for?" your ride asks on the way home.

"I don't remember," you lie. Privacy is dignity when voting is an inevitable comedy. "My butt hurts. I should win."

Ethnic studies are bad; Bible is good - OR, Angry Rant at No One

A law was passed in AZ on May 12, 2010 that has scheduled the end of ethnic studies in the state for December 31, 2010. This is overdue. Ethnic studies promote the overthrow of the government. They encourage minorities to join in what they call "solidarity," or a mob-like state in which people assume that they are disempowered and must kill their oppressors to attain justice.

Do we need our youth learning that they are "oppressed" and need to free themselves through violence? No. If they are oppressed, it's better that they keep their peace in oppression than that they break a system that is working for many well-intentioned white people.

More power to you, Arizona!

I feel a little bit conflicted, though, because if I am all white, does that mean that I don't have an ethnicity? There are no ethnic studies classes for white people. "Ethnos" means people, so does that mean I am not a person? Ethnic, according to The American Heritage Dictionary 2000 edition I have at my house, also has as one of its meanings: "not Christian or Jewish, heathen." So, because I am not covered in ethnic studies, I am a Muslim terrorist?

Or what if one of my white ancestors was an oppressor of my other white ancestor, and one part of me tries to rise up and destroy the other part to free itself? I am both English and Irish. Shouldn't I pass a ban on myself from reading Irish literature to protect the English part of me from being choked in my sleep by a drunk, power-hungry Irishwoman? And maybe I am not all white. Maybe I am a real, ethnic person, and not a terrorist at all.

Maybe one of those not-white people slept with one of my English ancestors, and my Irish self is choking me in the night without just cause? I could be part African, or Chinese, or Nigerian, or Indian, and not even know it. Then my Chinese self might decide it's oppressed and take out its English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch and Lithuanian oppressors in me. But only if I start reading about Chinese culture.

The only safe way for even a peace-loving caucasian like me to escape the rage of the oppressed is to not read anything except the Bible. There are no ethnic people in the Bible. It is the history of pure people and God's call to them to come home throughout history. Even if someone who wasn't in the Bible has snuck into your family, it's OK if you only read the Bible because you're not reading anything that would make them think that they didn't deserve their oppression. But if you are very white and you know for sure that you are, it is even more dangerous for you; don't read anything - just listen to the voice of God, which is unobstructed in you by threats of biological insurrection.

And if you aren't white, do you really think you need to kill people to have a good life? No, well why are you fighting to read books that encourage the overthrow of the government? People will die if you overthrow the government. People are dying now, but those are from natural causes. Death is a part of life, so stop trying to think that you need to do something to make the world better.


HB 2281, thanks for saving us from the wretched bodies of the earth. Their brain cells are a threat to the American way. See them in detention, self-serving their agitated state. It's contained and right; we're free from their spite and history.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Watch out for the rainbowed rest, the so-called oppressed. And the Irish.

Horse, carriage, plane and spaceship

I teach English for Speakers of Other Languages. This morning I was making copies from a grammar book for my students, and saw a profile on the Wright brothers, and this text in the margin: “Did You Know: Neither of the Wright brothers ever married. Their only love was aviation.”

For me, marriage is the ‘other language.’

The trivia fact made me smile until tonight while I was doing research on the brothers. I saw them described several times as ‘eccentric geniuses’; what if I end up having traded companionship for faithfulness to my ideas when I die? What if I end up being an eccentric genius whom no one ever knows? Or, worse, if I simply end eccentric and alone?

Understanding how two people could be happy in a “marriage” is like learning a foreign language for me. Sometimes I feel like I am daily moving into acquisition of the grammar of interpersonal intimacy. Other times, a whisper of the topic of commitment enters conversation, and I effuse to anyone who will listen about freedom in self-sufficiency.

Then I usually have an inner reprobation about how helpful it is to have a safety net in being a rugged individual. I think of the multiple times that I left my headlights on, draining my car of batteries and requiring a jumpstart - multiple times in a week. Or the time when I got lost driving on the backroads of my hometown trying to find a new way home after a New Year’s party.

And the absolute thrill I get every time I step onto an airplane for a journey alone into a new part of the world. This pull between independence and security is exhausting. How liberating it might be to say, once and for all, “My only love is ____________.”

Aside from the Wright brothers profile, another piece of text that caught my eye recently was in an article about a female astronaut. It was a profile of her rise to a brilliant career as one of the first African American women in space exploration. The article detailed her early passion for science, her start at Harvard, the mentorships that shaped her path, and finally her groundbreaking achievements as a successful space traveler and technician. Then, near the end of the article: “Smith, who is single and lives near Houston’s Johnson Space Center, says her next goal is a long-duration stay on the space station.”

What is up with these people who like to fly? Can marriage - or even partnership beyond the point of brotherhood or settling down long-term with a space station, coexist with passionate career genius?

One of the two Wright brothers, Orville, stopped speaking to his younger sister Katharine when she got married. My grandmother often tells me the story of a distant cousin who didn’t get married until she was in her fifties, and doesn’t regret waiting. A part of me detests marriage as the door behind which no wonder, no surprise, no spontaneous discovery lives.

I love ideas. I love to travel. I love learning from my own mistakes. A part of me loves marriage as a language whose grammar channels selfless abandon into the ideal of sharing life. A language of freedom. Freedom from thinking, from ideas harassing me as an inner itch to question even the most mundane facts of daily experience; from doubting that I am not leaving a piece of my heart designed for partnership as an orphan, cold and without mercy; from weird, harsh vowels and consonants crocked together in a way that hurts my ears but feeds my mind with dreams of a deeper, unmet harmony in the realization of profound ideas.

When I wake up in the morning, however, I see the Wright brothers, brilliant ‘til death did from them their curiosity part, and I love them more than I love marriage.

Like the brothers, I want an open contract with my intellect. I want to experience partnership as something constantly moving away from emotional certainty, rather than into it, over the course of a lifetime. Be that with aviation, outer space, an idea or a living, imperfect human being, I’ll take it when I find it.

Yankee Girl Gone Wild, Democratic

Not every country is such a hot mess as is the United States of America. Our outward-facing point of pride in the world is democracy, yet the GOP still has representatives like Scott Brown in blue Massachusetts, able to knock out the Democratic supermajority in congress. Republicans are de facto accepted as having the word on American values; who objects when someone holds up a pro-life poster next to an American flag? If they do object, it’s not as loudly as the voices protesting welfare, affirmative action and stem cell research.

Another messy point: democracy was first prevalent in the South, where Republicans now avidly denounce those slippery Democrats. The government is a tool to build up business, the industrial north said. People, in their ignorance, cannot be trusted to govern, it said. The North started out full of the same ideological stubbornness that now defines many red states’ voting. They leaned on intellectual status rather than active concern for the radically “Other” for social security.

How did New England become a place where no idea debuts without passing the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of students and passionate autodidacts? Sounds like a shameless democracy. Sounds like we northerners let our wild ideas get in the way of our peaceful, boring decency.

I am deeply opposed to the possibility that thinking could be a source of moral decay. Thinking - that process of withdrawing from human events in order to procure ideals that may positively direct those human events - is one of my favorite activities. I am loathe to surrender my thoughts to belief without extracting proof first, and am disdainful of anger as a reaction to hardship. I don’t believe in losing my head in argument - that’s the quickest way to lose. When lonely, I would rather go to the library than talk to someone about it. Drawing moral boundaries feels like an intellectual cop-out. Sharing my feelings without reflecting on them first - sometimes I wonder if at that point they still are feelings - is the pathway to anarchy.

Therefore, the South - in its love of immediate gratification, its reactionary tendencies, its obsession with human stories in country music, the dysfunction of its cholesterol-filled arteries and its violence against those who cross social boundaries - is the face of America that terrifies me as a wild dog terrifies a housecat, or a football player a gaunt, traveling musician. It is the embodiment of the most negative experiences I have had, from being called cruel names for not flirting with a football player to being deaf to people whose ideals are unpopular. My Southern self chastises me for keeping a closed heart to social authority, and on the other hand drives me to guiltily cling to the authority of my native cultural smugness. I am comfortable with the kind of social authority that excludes the earnest. If there were any social authority in me aside from the pomp of fashionable thinking, I don't think I would recognize it.

Collaborative reason in government is that of which our country has to be most proud, but New England is not where I see it happening. Yes, democracy is thought about more here. We ask constantly: What is democracy? How is it structured? Is it possible under the current conditions in Massachusetts, New England, the United States, the world? Does it require moral sacrifice? Where is evangelism’s place in democracy? The media’s, education’s, the fine arts’, unions’, self-doubt’s, sex’s place? How should we use our money? Where should we place our attention as a world power with the ability to direct the development of “second and third world countries”? Have we made racial progress? What can science do for humanity now? What defines the human family? Why have we failed, failed, failed to be a force for good in the world?

With all of these problems to occupy a Bostonian's mind, it is easy to see people who bring their personal desires into community as unthinking caricatures. The label that speaks to me most immediately is that of the Southern Belle. Talk about a hot mess - feeding her vanity at every opportunity, demanding respect, making mistakes and then taking them back, breaking hearts without remorse as she discovers who she is in all of her "wild beauty."

Everything that gives a sensible industrial girl a headache. Everything that brings a Federalist to the point of bitter surrender in the cause for progress. Everything that undermines the values of hard work, pride-in-virtue, self-inquiry and having one’s ideological act together.

Everything that bears out a politics of humanity, and a source of hope for America as a compassionate world power.