A partnership of right...

[la_belle_laide]

I've liked the voting process since I was a wee little girl and my Dad used to bring me into the voting booth and pick me up so I could press the buttons.

As of today, there are no more buttons, no more foam-green booth with the lever to open and close the curtain and cast the vote. As of today, you fill in your votes on paper and then feed it into a machine.

I miss the buttons and the booth, but I still vote the exact same way I have done since the week after I turned 18: with all my heart.

I know that sounds cheesy or weird or whatever, but I vote like crazy when I go in there, and my palms sweat and I get ridiculously passionate. While filling in my circles today, I had this mantra going through my head: Protect my rights. I'm a huge cynic to the point where on most days, I don't even really believe that there's anyone out there doing any sort of protecting of anyone's rights. And it kills me that I still have to worry about this sort of thing. Why do we still have to fight for these things? How dare anyone leave the fate of human rights in the hands of so few people? How dare all of society think that we eve need to vote on such things as who gets to marry whom? Or what women may and may not do with our bodies? HOW IS THIS EVEN A VOTING ISSUE?

But it is, so I vote, all the while thinking, "Please don't take away my ownership of my body just because I don't have a dick. Please don't take away people's rights to be together because of what they decide to do with their dangly or non-dangly bits. Please don't take away the clean air I like to breathe and clean water I like to drink because it makes you a quicker buck. Please don't rape my paycheck because I make less than a million billion dollars."

I know that change is a slow process and it seems like for every step in the direction of freedom and personal power, someone drags us back another few feet. It is a slow, inch-by-inch process, or maybe like a pendulum of ages. Every few years—every period--we get some new rights. Every few years resisting force pulls it back and we lose some again. But if you watch long enough, you see that the upswing of fairness and sanity goes a little higher each time.

I'm a cynic but I'm also an optimist, and that's why I vote.

Comments

[vamp-seamstress.livejournal.com]

Yes yes YES to everything you just said.

[la-belle-laide.livejournal.com]

^_^

[malenka-zeut.livejournal.com]

Ditto vamp-seamstress!!!

[endisknocking.livejournal.com]

word. i also enjoy the interpretation i've heard that what we're seeing are the dying screams of a lot of acceptable hate. some trolls will stick around, underground, sure. but they are panicked that the tide is wearing away the rock. sometimes, chunks break off.