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November 7, 2006

i voted

Win or lose (and I am desperately hoping for win), I felt pretty good about voting this morning. My polling place was at a firehouse in Downtown LA, and although turnout was way thin, the motley assemblage of poll-workers filled me with a kind of warm, to-the-brim love for my whacked-out and fragile community. There was the older immigrant woman (Chinese?) who fumbled a bit but also beamed at everyone with what seemed to be a combination of grandmotherly love and pride at participating in the new country's rituals and procedures. There was the grizzled black retiree who was all brusque business, dude obviously taking his role in the democratic process very seriously. There was the 40-something-ish, jangly and desperately happy gent who seemed a week out of rehab or AA, his every word vibrating with the high enthusiasm of the recently sober, his body and mind still running a few cycles too fast, but what the heck - it's election day: there are things to do, ballot cards to stack. There was the pair of fireman murmuring and keeping their own counsel behind cups of coffee, maybe glad to be seeing all these voters upright in here instead of laid out and in need of rescuing out on the street. There was the young Latino dude text-messaging across the ether with a brand new Motorola slim-phone PDA, his generationally-endowed ease with techology winning him the job of ballot-card-machine-feeder, which besides being a place of futuristic honor also gave him a bit of private time with all the ladies coming in and voting, downtown hipsters behind shades at that hour, a category that including my girlfriend, to whom he offered "for you? Anything!" apropos of nothing as her ballot went whirring away to be counted. It all really made me quite grateful and proud.

Posted by ebogjonson in city of angels, politricknal sciences, on November 7, 2006 2:36 PM