I went to vote today.
Notice I said I went to vote. I got in my car, I drove to my polling place, had interaction with other people, then went into a voting booth and punched my selections for who I wanted to represent me, lead my government, and say yea or nae to a series of ballot initiatives. I didn't sit in my house and leaf through web pages before mailing in a ballot six weeks ago. I didn't do that because I have to draw a line in the cement when it comes to all these wonderful "advances" we've made in our post-modern world.
It used to be, a way back in great-great-great-grandpa's time, that we pretty much did everything in public. For the great mass of humanity there were always others around no matter what you were doing. America's expansion is the direct result of a guy saying "I can't stand being around you people anymore" and heading out for Injun country where much to his surprise he found out that basic survival meant needing people he might not be terribly fond of. But at least he didn't have his neighbor knowing what he was eating for breakfast or knowing if the extraction of said breakfast went smoothly a few hours later.
Yet our solid pioneer forefathers still came together to pray, politic, and party. Those three were considered the entertainment portion of their lives and they did it as a community. As time went on and we became more "civilized" our need for a massive group became less and less. Ten churches replaced the one, the square danced morphed into the theater which morphed into the movie theater which morphed into TV, each step a bit less and less communal. I'll argue that it was politics that took the longest to centralize down to the one. Oh sure we hear about "retail" politics in the early primaries and how it has to expand into televised ads in the larger states and how the presidential campaigns are really just prime time soap operas but after it's all done, after all the shouting has died down, you had to walk out the door of your home, stand in line, declare your name and address for all the world to hear and then step into a booth and make your mark.
That was democracy.
In the guise of simplifying our ever busier lives, those in power have declared they want to make it easier and easier for us to vote. Where as once it was so inconvenient to absentee vote that business and pleasure trips were rearranged to avoid the issue, now whole states say to hell with the ballot box, let's turn the postal box into one and have mail in elections only. Show up at the wrong polling place? No problem, go ahead and use a "provisional" ballot and it will get counted once it's verified you're not voting early and often (the "Chicago Way"). I'm old enough to remember when bars opened only after the polls closed on election day. Oh, excuse me, that was Election Day. Now you can be as tight as you want as you express how tight you are when you won't pay an extra dime to fund a civic improvement. And every year there seems to be a new, improved system for telling us the result faster and faster so that the second the digital display hits 8PM we can know the winners and losers.
I'm going to put on my grumpy old man pants and suggest that it's time to let up on the easy button. Everything else in our lives keeps getting easier and easier, let's make democracy if not harder, at least a bit more difficult than voting for the next American Idol. Let's say that if you don't want to take the time to stand in a line and meet with your fellow townspeople and pull the curtain shut (or at least hunch your shoulders over so the guy next to you can't see who you vote for) then you have to go to City Hall and pick up the absentee ballot, not have it mailed to you because you clicked the box on the webpage. And if you show up at the wrong polling place well then guess what, you have to take personal responsibility and go to the right one. And instead of instant gratification (and I use the phrase cautiously) on election night, lets go back to paper ballots and a black Sharpie and if it takes three days to count all the ballots then it's okay because, lets be honest, those of us who remember the election of 2000 would be happy to wait three days instead of three months.
I'm saying all this because I know that when that when the going gets easy, we humans slide down the path to taking it for granted. When we take it for granted we don't notice when it disappears. And when it disappears then we shrug our shoulders and say give me the next easiest thing. "I don't have a say in how the government works anymore? That's okay, that nice guy with the Charlie Chaplin mustache will take care of me."
You don't have to take the ballot box away to make democracy a fossil. You need only butterfly a few ballots, or hang a few chads, or have a glitch in the counting software of one or two key districts and poof there goes another Iraqi or Afghani village. One way we as Americans can at least make it more difficult for the bastards is to show up at that precinct, stomp our collective foot and make sure that vote counts.
An American president once said "America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad,". Well actually it was THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT which was a movie and has been relegated in entertainment history to being the first draft of THE WEST WING but the sentiment is right. You gotta want it bad, so bad that you'll get up off the La-Z-Boy and show up and be counted. And because you showed up and were counted and talked to your neighbors and helped the little old lady poll worker who couldn't spell your name right, maybe, just maybe, your own little part of the world got better.
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