I just voted for the first time in a presidential election.
I missed voting in 2004 by a few months, which was terribly devastating, as I've been a political junkie since I was thirteen, accustomed to spending the average election day working outside of the polls as soon as school let out. Now that I am of age, I make a point to get to my polling place at the time it opens. Normally that's no problem, because how can you expect me to sleep on an election night when there's so much excitement? I've moved around the city a lot in the past few years, always living in a low-income, low-turnout district in Brooklyn or the Bronx. As such, every time I've voted, I've been the first person in my ED to do so.
Not today.
I showed up at the school at 6AM on the dot. Normally this would mean questioning a sleepy security guard as to where the voting machines are located, waiting around while the poll workers get their lists ready, and then serve as their beta-tester for the machine. Instead, I was shocked to see a line extending past the security guard's desk, all the way into a multi-purpose room that appeared to double as a cafeteria and a basketball court (sounds like a recipe for disaster to me).
Lining up under the hoops were my neighbors. Diverse as hell, of every race and age and shape, some who had been voting at this same spot for decades, some who were clearly recent arrivals in Brooklyn. And I didn't even have my usual impulse to grumble about gentrification and hipsters - because I knew we were all (90+% of us at least, I'm sure a retrospective look at polling by congressional district will show) here for the same reason. When the man who made it on line in front of me saw how long he'd have to wait, he just announced, "I'm waiting. I'll be late for work, but I've had enough of this."
(By "enough of this" he meant enough of eight years of oligarchy, not excessive waits at polling stations, of course)
By the time I made it to the front of the line, many people in my election district had already voted. No perks like testing the machine, no bragging rights, for me. I voted for Obama and my local electeds on the Working Families Party line (a local fusion party that was essentially formed by my former employer and the GOP's favorite boogeyman, ACORN) - even though I frequently disagree with some of WFP's endorsement choices and political tactics, it sends a progressive message to the state party.
If so many of my neighbors are as anxious as I am to vote, I know in my gut we're headed towards a blowout. A president of integrity and a supermajority in congress to give him some elbow room.
I was seventeen years old when I first became aware of Obama. I returned home from a summer schoolbuilding trip in Kenya the day he gave his convention speech. Like everyone who saw it, I was incredibly moved, but not just by his lofty yet complex vision for a united America. Also because of the way he spoke of his grandfather learning in a one-room school house with a corrugated tin roof - just like what the students I had worked with and taught English to all summer had grown up with. I saw Obama as an embodiment of a dream in which an impoverished child in Kenya could not only hope to spawn, over the course of two generations, someone with a chance to lead and inspire the world at large. Having returned to East Africa several times over the past few years to do education-related work, I've seen that there are millions of children all over the world who will know, by this time tomorrow, that they don't have to wait two generations. They themselves may have a stake in reshaping this world in the wake of the long neo-conservative slaughter.
So get to the polls! Gird yourself for a long wait - and treasure every last second of it.