I've been waiting for this day for a long time. My first diary.
I woke up this morning, safe and healthy and eagerly waiting for the beginning of my freshman year in college next week, because of a choice my Great-grandparents made a century ago. Their lives at 18 were radically different. My mother's grandfather had by my age seen his sister raped by Cossacks. My father's grandmother was already wondering, as she would for the remainder of her life, about the fate of her two brothers, taken against their will to serve in the Czar's army and never heard from again. All endured crippling discrimination and poor prospects for economic and educational advancement.
They had no ballot to cast to end any of this, so they voted with their feet instead and set sail for the New World. It's the classic American tale. Papa Sam had only been in America for a few years when, brimming with patriotic pride in his adopted homeland, he signed up for the Navy at the onset of WWI. A quarter-century later, having achieved modest success as a shopkeeper, he was the first person at the neighborhood rally after Pearl Harbor to stand up and buy war bonds to fight the Nazis, who had replaced the Russians in our familial nightmares.
My father's Grandfather, my namesake, was not as successful in business, but had a good heart, letting people buy food from his shop on credit in the depths of the Great Depression. He was mourned when, decades later, an armed robber murdered him, and today a children's library in his small Midwestern town bares his name.
These men (and their spirited, indomitable wives), treasured their new-found freedom and, thanks to it, envisioned bigger things for their descendants. My grandparents were the first in their families to go to college. As the country changed, new doors opened; my mother went to a college that had only a few decades before set quotas on Jewish students and only began admitting women the year before she started. Today, she works in a field that was once solely the province of men.
I'm cognizant that, without the core freedoms that make the American experience such a special one, I couldn't even be writing this. In all likelihood, my grandparents would have perished in a death camp and I and my parents would have never been born. I also know, like any nation, America is an imperfect one, with a history filled with problems, conflicts and contradictions. The beauty of our system is its capacity to be shaped by those of us who live under it; whether it was my grandparents protesting the treatment of their friends and neighbors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, my parents advocating for civil rights or me, their son, campaigning and registering voters for a president I believe in.
All of this flitted through my head today as I went to cast my first vote in an election. I think, as American stories go, my family's is pretty ordinary. Yet, contrasted with the grand arc of human history, each and every one of our stories are, to my mind, pretty extraordinary. In a hundred years my family, and so many others, have gone from victims of their circumstances to, at least in some part, the shapers of it. Our world is not perfect or just or peaceful or equal, but it is ours. I'm young. I have hope. I'm ready to fight with everything I have for what I believe is right, and today I gained a new weapon. Somewhere downtown, right now, my vote is being tallied.