Please go vote
So it’s finally almost here.
Election Day is next Tuesday. By the time you get this newspaper, readers, many of you — of us — already will have voted, by mail or in person early, and the rest of us, we devoutly hope, have made plans to go to the actual polls on the actual day.
I remember what voting using to be like; different municipalities use different technologies, but the machines I remember, the ones that signal voting to me, that tell me that this is the real thing, were the big, unattractive, unwieldy structures that you’d walk into, once you’d gone through the line and signed the ledger and it finally was your turn.
You’d pull the huge red lever at the bottom of the large screen, less like a modern screen as we use the word today than a massively overgrown but ancient flat cash register, and the curtains would close behind you. You’d be left alone with a list of names and a row of small red handles. You’d pull down the handle by the name of your chosen candidate, an X would show up in the little box by the name, and you’d move on to the next race.
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When you were done, you’d pull the big red lever again, and it would make the most satisfying thunk you could imagine as it moved the levers back to neutral, opened the curtains, and counted your vote. It would never occur to you to worry about the counting.
That lovely thunk was the sound of voting. It was the clunk of democracy. In its way, it was a romantic sound, and I loved it.
Everything’s different now, and of course I don’t mean the machines, in any way except symbolically.
We used to be able to vote for different candidates and still be friends. Democrats and Republicans could coexist in the same family; maybe they’d tease each other about it, but that would be the end of it.
Now we are at each other’s throats.
The only way to start to get out of it is for everyone who is eligible to vote. Voting matters. Participating in democracy matters.
It is a civic mitzvah to vote. It is our great privilege, and it is also our great responsibility.
I am not going to pretend that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, as long as you vote. The choice that faces us this year at the top of the ticket is as stark as it has been in the lifetime of the oldest among us. The two candidates, the world views they hold, and the way forward (or back) that they represent are as different as possible.
We at the Jewish Standard do not endorse candidates. That’s our tradition, for real, going back for as long as any of us can remember. We’re not doing a sad Washington Post/L.A. Times gavotte here. But, like our readers, every one of us here has a strong opinion about who should win and whose victory will be a terrifying defeat for everything we hold dear.
We hope that our readers consider the difference between truth and lies, and vote for the truth. We hope that you balance all the competing needs and vote with your heads; we hope that you consider all the historic echoing dangers and vote with your hearts. We hope that you think about the new-but-somehow-age-old landscape that confronts us and vote to dismantle it, not to indulge it. We hope that you keep the very real values of civility, decency, compassion, and goodness in mind when you vote.
And we hope that once the election finally is over — which it well might not be until the end of the week, or even later — and that when the violence that has been threatened and many of us fear has been averted, we somehow can all come together once again, as one proud people.
Now, please go vote!
—JP
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