To wear it or not to wear it, that is the question.
I handed my ballot back to the nicely dressed man at the polling place. “Pretty simple ballot this time,” I remarked with a smile.
“Yup,” he nodded back. “Pretty straightforward.” And with that, he handed me my sticker. Without much thought, I peeled it off the backing and stuck it to the front of my oversized sweatshirt. A few moments later, I walked into a local restaurant and spotted the smiling Irish eyes of the owner who I’m happy to call a friend.
“Obama or Hillary?” he asked as he greeted me.
Oh yeah, the sticker.
Last night I asked my students if they were going to vote. To my pleasant surprise, most said yes. That wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t so long ago that voter apathy was the standard, especially among young people.
I grew up in a political family. My dad was a county freeholder. Here in California they call them supervisors, but the job is the same. They’re elected officials who are responsible for county government. As a kid, I spent countless hours campaigning, shaking hands, making phone calls, handing out bumper stickers and smiling until my face hurt. Political conversations were commonplace around the dinner table and Election Day meant spending the night at a local restaurant drinking way too many Shirley Temples and watching the returns come in. In local politics every vote counts so good voter turnout often meant the difference in the results. It was exciting stuff for a kid, especially when the votes came in favor of my favorite candidate.
I didn’t realize it then but it drove home the importance of voting.
“Who’re you going to vote for?” my son asked me as I drove him to school this morning for a 6:00 a.m. baseball practice (which is fodder for another blog).
“What do you think?” I asked him and we launched into a conversation of the perceptions of a 16 year old.
I have to say, I was impressed. His observations, while somewhat different than my own, were surprisingly coherent, even for that hour of the morning. Unlike the dinner table of my youth, it’s not the standard of conversation that frequently at ours. He’d obviously done some thinking about it on his own. Good boy.
And so, I wear my sticker. It’s a membership card to the club, a sign that lets others know that you care too. But more than that, it’s a reminder to me of the opportunity we have to participate in this process, as crazy as it is sometimes.
And it’s not a bad way to meet guys either, especially cute Irish ones.
