The most beautiful description of Election Day in America was written by Theodore H. White in his book The Making of the President, 1960. He said of voting that “It was invisible, as always … It is the essence of the act that as it happens, it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together.”
That mystery is playing out across Michigan today. Tomorrow, we will know who the major party nominees for governor will be, and for the senate, and who the almost certain winners will be in the open Ninth and Thirteenth Congressional Districts.
That’s what the voters are deciding today. Except, that is, for about half a million of us who already filled out absentee ballots. But many more won’t vote at all.
And that is a shame and a disgrace. I never miss an election, and here’s why. When I was 12 years old, three college students, two white and one black, went down to Mississippi to try to register African-American citizens to vote.
Hard as it may be to believe, black people couldn’t vote in many places in the South, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and James Cheney decided to try to help them exercise their basic constitutional right, as part of something called Freedom Summer.
The young men were promptly arrested by a local sheriff, who notified the Klan. They kidnapped and murdered them all. The two white boys were shot almost immediately; Cheney, who has black, was first tortured with chains.
They were dead for more than six weeks before their bodies were found. I remember the case very vividly, and because they gave their lives so that people could have the right to vote, I have always felt that I had an obligation to vote, in every election.
I think everyone should feel that way. Tragically, most registered voters in Michigan won’t vote today.
Many of us don’t pay much attention to politics. It’s easy to be cynical, to have the attitude that one gang of crooks is as bad as the other, and go o the gym after work instead.
Well, a certain amount of cynicism and frustration is justified. But the fact is that politics can make the world better, or worse.
Martin Luther King Jr. said he couldn’t be satisfied until the black man in Mississippi could vote, and the black man in New York felt he had something for which to vote.
Well, everyone in Mississippi can vote these days. And it may sometimes feel like many of us, white as well as black, don’t have very much to vote for. But there clearly are also things to vote against: Racism, sexism, economic injustice.
Some voters say they vote in primary elections, because they see them as just preliminaries. But thanks to gerrymandering, in most districts, the primary election is the election.
The next congressman in the Thirteenth Districts will be elected today. Republicans don’t even have a candidate in November.
That’s even truer for most legislative races. Do you like the way things are now? Think everything is as good as it could be?
Unless the answer is no, you need to do a little research and vote. The future will be glad that you did.
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