My ballot came in the mail this afternoon. What a joy to cast my vote for Barack Obama, the next President of the United States. It's been a long time coming. . . . As soon as I opened the ballot, I realized I wanted to vote and get it back in the mail this very day. So I lit a candle, sat down, and marked my ballot.
It sounds simple, but I felt the weight of history as I moved my pen across the heavy paper. And as I completed the arrow leading to Barack Obama's name, I did so in conscious recognition and appreciation of two of the heroes in my life, my mom and my stepdad.
First, I voted today in memory of my stepfather. He died exactly eight years ago, on October 9, 2000. I wrote about how Joe helped inspire me to a life of progressive activism in an earlier diary.
October 9 was already a date connected with Joe: The McGovern campaign, which Joe was heavily involved in (as I was as a teenager) had a bumpersticker printed that read "Remember October 9," because that was the day in 1968 when Richard Nixon had said, "Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance." Joe had stuck the "Remember October 9" bumpersticker on the trash bucket under the sink in our family bathroom, and there it remained until my mom cleaned the house out after he died. When I got the morning call on October 9, 2000, telling me that Joe had died, I rushed down to my parents' house, an hour away. Just as I got there, Joe's mail-in ballot was delivered. If it had come a day earlier, Joe would have been able to cast his intended vote for Al Gore (even suffering from stomach cancer, he was engaged politically until the end). As it was, I was sorely tempted to cast it for him, but I refrained from committing voter fraud. Today, as I voted for Obama, I sensed how pleased Joe would be. He had been active in the civil rights movement, and his response to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination — piling our white family in the car to go to the one black Baptist church in town so we could share the grief with others similarly bereft — had played a role in awakening my longing to work to end injustice.
Second, I cast my vote for Obama in honor of my mother. My mother has been an activist for peace and social justice since her college days. I spent MLK Jr. Day this year watching MLK's speeches on YouTube, and in the process found a short bit of footage of Marian Anderson in 1939 singing at the Lincoln Memorial, where MLK later gave his "I Have a Dream" speech (in which he picked up on Anderson's "My Country Tis of Thee" theme of "Let freedom ring"). Listening to these two giants of the movement for racial equality courtesy of modern technology, I reflected on how deeply moving I find it to envision an African-American as eloquent and inspiring as Obama becoming our president.
Later that evening, as I was telling my mom about the MLK speeches and the Marian Anderson footage and my thoughts on Obama, she got very emotional. It turned out that her earliest memory of her own awareness of social justice was of when she was nine years old and heard the news that the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution) had decided not to allow Anderson to sing in their hall. My grandmother was a member of the local D.A.R. in the small town in western Pennsylvania where they lived, and she defended the D.A.R.'s decision with unquestioning prejudice, but my mother knew in her heart and gut at that moment that my grandmother's prejudice, and the larger society's prejudice, was wrong. And as she grew up and went on to win a scholarship to Wellesley, her commitment to social justice gained an outlet. She participated in summer programs that involved organizing with blacks in the labor movement in Chicago and continued her activism when I was a child, when she and my stepfather were strong and active supporters of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and numerous other causes. She's still active today, at 78, and this campaign season she's been making calls to urge Californians to vote No on 8 (the initiative in California that would take away the recently won right of same-sex couples to marry). She cast a proud vote for Obama in the primary, and I'm sure she'll mail in her ballot for the general as soon as it arrives.
So today I cast my vote in memory of my stepfather and in honor of my mother, both of whom have always been models for me of engaged activism on behalf of peace and justice, with a profound sense of how Obama's election will be the fruition of what they've both worked for all of their lives.
Of course, casting my vote for Obama just took a moment, as did voting No on 8. But living here in Berkeley, California, also entailed voting on 11 other state propositions, 9 city and regional measures, and for various local candidates running for a range of offices. Fortunately, I've attended a few endorsement meetings of local Democratic clubs, and I had a fairly clear sense of how I intended to vote on them, so I was able to navigate the lengthy ballot fairly quickly.
Within ten minutes, I was done. I put my ballot in its envelope, signed the back, and set out the door for a ten-minute walk to my local post office. It's a gorgeous fall day here, as beautiful as the East Bay can dish up in October. How invigorating it felt to walk purposefully to cast my vote for change, with a keen sense of the personal history in my family that renders the moment even more meaningful, and full of thoughts of the millions in this country who have fought for this moment for decades, and for centuries.¡Sí se puede! Together, we can do it!