Rock the Vote

Waitress - Live (mp3)
Lights are Changing - Mary Lou Lord (mp3)

I stood in line for a gloriously short 20 minutes yesterday and spent 10 more going through the truly amazing process of pitching in my $0.02 worth into our democratic republic. I voted.

Tennessee, thankfully, is one of many states which permit early voting for any reason. We might be backwards on many things, but early voting isn't one of 'em. So, I took off for lunch and traveled to the lovely city-burb we call Brainerd, and I voted at their community center. The line was all the way down a hallway, around a corner, and a quarter of the way into the gymnasium. When I arrived, I was on the free-throw line.

The line at this particular location, at 11:15 or so in the morning, was made up of two very distinct people: African-Americans and white AARP members. Not to swim in stereotypes for too terribly long, but it didn't take rocket science to know how the vote in this line divvied up.

What I didn't expect, however, was the general mood of the people in line. Somehow, standing in a long line to vote didn't make anyone angry or impatient. We were all having little conversations about nothing, smiling and getting along and happy to exercise our democratic participation.

All this despite already knowing how Tennessee will go to John McCain in the election. (Mondale won Minnesota; Gore couldn't win his own state. Barack never had a chance here.)

That, my friends (a McCain-ism!), is what I love about this country of ours. When you see people of two different minds, all of whom know exactly how something is gonna pan out, standing in line to make their marks anyway. Because you just never know. Because we only get to vote in 20 or so Presidential Elections if we're really lucky. Because, in some teensy miniscule way, every vote really counts. It counts in the national and state tally, and it counts in the feeling you have standing in that line, in filling out that election ballot, in walking back out to your car and knowing you've done one of the few civic duties your country asks of you.

Before yesterday, I would delete all of those emails I was getting from various RNC people -- yes, McCain, Orrin Hatch, Fred Thompson, even Kelsey Grammar have been sending me some four or five emails every day in the hopes of persuading me to get out and vote for them. I read my first one yesterday and enjoyed it thoroughly. I didn't watch Obama's Very Special Show last night. (Some are calling it his "pilot episode. If you believe his campaigning, it might be a great show, but it would constantly be changing the day and time it was shown.)

[At right is what happened to Kelsey Grammar after he started sending out emails for the Republican Party.]

If you want the single most compelling (albeit one-sided) break-down of why this election should go the way it will go, I implore you to read "The Choice" from the October 13 issue of The New Yorker.

Good luck, and be sure to vote. It feels good.

"Waitress" is from Live's 1991 album Throwing Copper. "Lights are Changing" is from Mary Lou Lord's debut, Got No Shadow. Both are available on iTunes and at Amazon.com's mp3 site.

Why I Love Young People

Thom Yorke--"After The Goldrush (live)" (mp3)
Cracker--"Teen Angst" (mp3)

Teaching in a well-to-do, mostly white private boys' school, as I have done for the past 25 years, I have long since stopped doing battle with my students over politics. Many of us, when we were younger, found ourselves in do-or-die philosophical wars with our students over all things political. But there was a price to be paid for that; after all, we were not teaching political science. We were teaching English. And if you want your boys to stick with you through a hard text, you're going to have to put some things aside. That was an epiphany that took awhile.

For the longest time, we refused to acknowledge that our students were more conservative than we were and would continue to be so.

It seemed to go against the order of the universe. But the universe changes.

I'm glad.

This time around, I can't claim that my students have seen the light, have come over to my side of things, have cast off their parents' wealth-and-religion based conservatism to embrace the promise that is Obama (although I have noticed more students in the Democratic ranks than ever before). No, some have come back from the summer having volunteered for the McCain campaign, and many of them still hiss when the Young Democrats announce their meetings during clubs period.

That doesn't matter to me. One reason I love the neverending stream of 18-and-under boys who populate this school is because they show me that things have changed far beyond what this country understands yet.

Case in point: it doesn't cross most of my seniors' minds that anyone would let race determine who they would vote for in a presidential election. Maybe that isn't quite right. They will talk about the "old racists" and what the "old racists" will do or say, but they talk as if those people, though still living, represent the values of another time. And they don't hold those older people in judgement either; there's more likely kind of a shoulder shrug or matter-of-fact restatement of those beliefs.

I'm not naive enough to ignore the haters out there or the under-their-breath mutterers, but most of the students I teach have the hubris, perhaps justified, to want to challenge the economic policies of a candidate who wants health care for everyone; they're not interested in discussions of race.

Maybe we've beaten it out of them: too many years of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Native Son, The Color Purple, and the like. That is a possibility, because they aren't going to embrace a novel for its race any more than they are going to reject a candidate for his. They're like, 'Okay, I get it. Racism was bad. Please stop beating that message to death. We'd rather talk about whether or not individual suffering serves the greater good.'

My students have told me more than once, in more than one way, that the racial issues that I want to bring up don't matter to them. We forget, I think, that they've always lived in a world where if the black quarterback is better than the white one, then, of course, he should be the one who starts. We want to win, don't we? Apply the same thinking to any situation. And, for the same reason, they'd be upset if we went to them and said, 'We haven't ever started a black quarterback, so we need to start one now.' It would make no sense to them at all.

So we look at the upcoming election as being one of groundbreaking, historic proportions, a victory after years of struggle, a mandate for America. What do our students think? Maybe a little of that. They're certainly aware of it. But, more likely, they're thinking that if Obama wins, it will be because he ran the more effective campaign, and if he loses, it will be because he didn't. Sure, he faces obstacles, some of them unfair, some of them unethical, but so does any candidate, and it's his obligation to figure those out and to outmaneuver his opponent. That's the only way to win, isn't it? No one ever said it was going to be fair.


Thom Yorke's live performance of Neil Young's "After The Goldrush" took place at Young's Bridge Concerts. The well-known Cracker tune is available at Itunes.