Regular asthma/parenting/air quality/breathing content will resume Thursday. Until then, like a lot of other people I’ve given up focusing on anything other than this election.
Tomorrow’s the big day, finally. As of Saturday, 2.5 million Florida voters had already cast their early ballots, including me.
Over the weekend, an old college friend I haven’t talked to in years stumbled upon this blog. In an email, he asked when I got interested in politics because he didn’t remember me that way.
It’s a good question, and the answer goes back to my childhood.
I don’t usually write about my relatives here, since it’s my decision to blog about my life and my own kids, but my extended family didn’t make the decision to be my subjects, too. So I’ll paint the picture of my upbringing with these very broad strokes: I wasn’t raised in a household that followed politics or valued social consciousness or activism. It’s not that my family didn’t care about anything, but rather that their interests tended to be more specific and personal. Volunteerism in my house took the forms of teaching Sunday School, serving as Brownie and Cub Scout leaders, and helping out in classrooms instead. And those are worthy and admirable pursuits in their own way, of course.
But voting was not stressed, either. Politicians largely did not care about regular folks and voting for various ones did not impact everyday life in any meaningful or quantitative way, or so I was told. The attitude where I lived was less “Every Vote Counts” and more, “My Vote Won’t Change Anything, So Why Bother?”
All this background color may help you understand why I turned 18 in 1994 but, to my great and everlasting shame, did not register to vote until 2004, an entire decade later. And possibly why I care so much now.
I don’t mean to sound like one of those adults who blames their actions (or inactions, in this case) on their childhood experiences. Certainly the environment you’re raised in impacts the kind of adult you turn out to be, but that argument doesn’t hold water here. I wasn’t, after all, raised in a bubble, and plenty of outside influences differed from the attitude in my own house. I went to college. I had friends who came from politically active families. I watched TV and read newspapers like anyone else, and lots of people my age voted.
But that apathy in my childhood home did help me justify my own indifference to myself. In 1996, the first presidential election I was eligible to vote in, I was 20 years-old, in my junior year of college, and finally serious about my degree program (English lit.). More involved in classes and work and parties than U.S. politics, I liked President Clinton and had certainly formed political views by this age, but I didn’t see how my one vote would make much difference in his reelection that year and never bothered to register. I didn’t follow local races, and after Clinton’s second term, by the next presidential election in 2000, I was in a much different place.
Now I was 24 years-old and had graduated from college. A very-unplanned AG was a few months away from her second birthday, and we had just bought our first house. I didn’t want George H.W. Bush to win the presidency over Vice President Gore, but I was busy. I had a baby. And that baby not only came much earlier than I planned to have kids, but she seemed to get sick all the freaking time. The real reason I still hadn’t registered, though, is that I still couldn’t fathom my little vote affecting the outcome either way. How much does one vote really count, anyway?
As it turned out that year in Florida, quite a bit. The controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision that awarded the state of Florida to Bush–all 25 of our electoral votes**–was based on a difference of just 537 popular votes statewide. As you will recall, I’m sure, Gore actually won the popular vote that year. And if you share my political views and weren’t a child or on a desert island somewhere and did follow the recount controversy or even watched the movie recently, you may have been sitting on the couch and asking yourself,
What in the world happened in Florida?
Your answer:
Me, and 500+ other people like me.
Who either A) would have voted for Gore, had we made the effort to register in the first place, B) didn’t want Bush in office but voted for Ralph Nader or another third-party candidate, or C) were registered to vote, would have voted for Gore, but didn’t get motivated to go to the polls that year.
I learned my lesson.
It was almost impossible not to, living in this state in that year. I had an interesting perspective during the first four years of the Bush presidency, too. He took office in January 2001, a month before AG turned two. Shortly after that, three months into his first term, she was finally diagnosed with asthma but still had a long, breathless road to travel. So I watched Bush gut regulation after regulation of toxic pollutants and airborne irritants and weaken the EPA through political manipulation at the same time that I spent nights driving my kid to the ER and trying to muddle my way through her lung problems.
And I finally registered to vote in 2004, ten years after I turned 18.
I recognize that I have the typical passion of the newly converted. Because if 2000 taught me nothing else, it’s that–the responsibilities of American citizenship aside–every vote does count, especially since another narrow and controversial victory like the one Bush had in 2000 could happen again in my lifetime.
Just not this year.
(fingers crossed)
**Florida has 27 electoral votes in 2008.
What a great story! I think Florida and election 2000 makes a great case for voter participation!
What a powerful story you tell – even more so because it is real life. Thanks for writing this.
Although I live in Canada, and I didn’t have much of a political bent until my 20’s, I am now a bit of a politics junkie
At least, I remember for the 2004 election my little guy was still nursing at 2 am. I stayed up as late as I could to try to find out who would win the election, but eventually had to go to bed. After the 2 am feed I turned on the radio news (CBC does a broadcast every hour) to discover that there still wasn’t an answer. Unbelievable.
I also have friends who feel they don’t follow events well enough to vote (they’d rather not vote than cast an uneducated vote, and for whatever reason they don’t have a driving passion to educate themselves on the issues). I also have friends that feel their vote doesn’t mean much. I hope one day they will feel differently.
And, DH and I will be on the edge of our seats tomorrow night too.
Andie
Ps. I think we really would hit it off in real life. Maybe someday we’ll have the chance to meet up!
I pretty much hate telling that story, actually, because it makes me feel sort of like a fraud when I talk about politics now, so uh–thanks for keeping it positive, guys. (winks)
Also worth noting, the Washington state governor’s race was decided by 129 votes in 2004. It’s an ugly rematch this year.