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October 07, 2003
Duty
I drove the wreck over to the polling place this morning. I was wearing my blackneck gear. I strolled casually into the joint, the rec room of a senior citizen condo village which serves this section of 90277.
There were about 5 poll workers there, all elderly women. The line was short, only one person was in front of me. My name was easily found on their printouts. They have some pretty nice laser printed stuff complete with bar codes. Everything was in order. Nobody asked me for any ID. I signed and verified that my address was correct, proceded to a second station where I recieved my ballot and got my named crossed off a second ledger in blue felt tip. I noticed some of the other names were crossed off in red.
My ballot was your standard pink thick paper punched card deally. You know the kind, the old-fashioned controversial type. I found a little booth and made my four punches. I checked to see that the punches were clean. No problem. I headed out, watched the last worker drop my ballot into the box marked 'got chads?' and got my little stub and 'I voted' sticker. 7 minutes tops.
Voting always seemed to be a kind of exercise in futility for me. I can't remember anything I ever really cared about voting for winning. Today the whole thing seemed relatively carefree - like picking up a dozen eggs from the supermarket.
It's all rather remarkable that so much (so little?) can change because of this simplistic little ritual. So much passion and fury attached. For some reason, I'm just not in a mood to be too excited about it this time. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because now that 14% of the precincts are reporting, everything I expected is happening. I'm casually in the majority rather than gnashing my teeth like the losers. Perhaps it's because I was ready for everything and see the significance of the election in ways not directly related to the first order effects. Perhaps it's because I'm already sick of hearing about it and no further hype or noise is going to do anything for me. Perhaps it's because I had a really good workout at the gym and am just looking forward to hot chocolate and 'Quicksilver' this evening.
Whatever the reason, I'm rather enjoying the simple pleasure of voting and the luxury of knowing whatever the result, yahoos with AK-47s aren't going to rampage in the streets tonight. I'm comfortable in the belly of the beast that transfers power to mediocre intellects peacefully.
I raise my glass to Warren Buffett and George P. Schultz. We're all fat, happy, lazy Americans tonight. Let's enjoy it while the Dollar still means something.
Posted by mbowen at October 7, 2003 09:20 PM
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