Note: This appeared in the Life, Under Construction Newsletter on November 5, 2024. For subscription information, please click on the button below.
Become a subscriber!A Citizen Inconvenienced
“…we defy augury: there’s a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all”
— Hamlet, V,ii
We suffer through the inconvenience to make the world better.
I found a parking spot at city hall the other day just a short walk to the door for early absentee voting. I only had to dodge a wayward Subaru with a driver that was more intent on speaking with his wife than navigating the lot to the exit.
Did she cancel his vote by voting for Harris? That seems to be a theme on both sides of the divides. Women should obey their husbands except when being led to the sin of voting for Democrats, a minister recently claimed. MAGA “influencer” Charlie Kirk, not known for his cognitive reasoning, agrees. Eve, the apple, did Adam bite into it first?
Across the divide, women are telling other women, psst, it’s okay. Nobody will know. So said the snake, right?
The final version of this voting parable is some manly men going to vote together when one of them looks at his daughter and decides to vote for Harris.
Okay, that last story I find somewhat realistic, given that I picked my daughter up from school on January 6 and found myself explaining what an unprecedented violent mob as attempting to accomplish that day at the Capitol.
Somebody else turned the story on its head, spotting a dad (presumably) wearing a hat which said, “The Hoe is just as bad as Joe.” He wondered how the dad explained that message to his two daughters, sitting across from him.
But I’ve sprawled into a “weave,” as Trump likes to say, and he’ll get the Nobel Prize for literature for it.
None of this ran through my head as I waited in line for Early Absentee Voting. Instead, I watched as one woman was turned away because she was in the wrong municipality. Must have been from the Village of Waukesha, not the city.
Another woman complained about standing and waiting with her walker. Her husband saw my face and said she didn’t want to vote curbside despite all the signage offering that option.
I turned to the person next to me in line (I talk to strangers) and said I didn’t use curbside voting because I thought I should let someone who really needed it use it without waiting. Had I known she wasn’t going to use it…
Another woman complained they didn’t have chairs. I imagined aloud all of us moving our chairs one space to the left every time someone in line in front of us completes their ballot. At this point, the line extended from the voting room and down the skywalk to the parking garage. I suggested, tongue-in-cheek, the city could pay for a conveyor belt instead. Voting as mass production.
But we all seemed to get through the line without incident. Walk up to the machine, input your votes, watch it print your ballot, put it in the envelope, seal it, stuff it in the box.
It all seems so anticlimactic at that point. I voted. Shouldn’t something happen?
But the best gift of American democracy is its promise of banality. You vote. Eventually your vote is counted, along with millions of others, in a process that is mind-numbingly dull. A winner is declared. Then life goes on.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Let us pray for dullness.
