My polling place is a little elementary school a couple blocks from Casa del Garrett.  They were calling for occasional rain this morning and rain this afternoon and evening, so I took an umbrella.  And my iPod and a book to read because of all the news stories I was hearing about long lines in the states that did early voting.

My polling place was busy, but not horribly so.  I was able to just walk right up to a vacant voting machine.  But all the others were being used, and a steady stream of people were coming in and out.

I’m at work now…seeing a bunch of co-workers here all with their "I Voted" stickers on.

I’m one of a first generation of 18-year-old voters.  18 year olds got the vote during the last years of Vietnam, largely on the argument that if we could be drafted and sent off to war at that age we should at least be able to cast a vote. 

I’d been taken on the bus to an involuntary pre-induction physical that summer, and escaped being drafted only because I was found to be 11 pounds underweight.  I suppose I could have simply told the examiners that I was a homosexual, but back in those days that could have easily meant having your name placed on a registry of sexual deviants. 

I voted that year for McGovern, mostly out of disgust with Nixon and his prolonging of the war…

As I Was Saying Four Years Ago

…but also because I thought McGovern a decent man who really did believe in liberty and justice for all.  After Kent State, I knew what Nixon and Agnew and their gang thought of all that liberty and justice stuff. 

And while Nixon didn’t actually start his war, he began the deliberate rending of the American fabric that we are living with today.  I’ve voted in every election I could since.  And as best as I could judge it, for the person who could make a decent start at putting back together, what the Nixon republicans tore asunder.  But after Nixon came Reagan.  And then…Bush The Junior.  The hatred with which the republican grass roots views the rest of us is deeper, more venomous then ever.  It didn’t have to be that way.  But the party leadership are republicans first, and Americans second, and they have stoked the hate in ways even Nixon might have found appalling, to keep their grip on power.

I don’t expect to see healing in my lifetime.  But it would be nice to live long enough to see a start on it.