“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear …
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else ….”
Walt Whitman
I’m a little sentimental, when it comes to voting.
Those every-two-year, dawn's-early-light forays to our local polling station are among the few times I really don’t mind standing in line. Not just because our particular voting place is stashed on one of the prettiest church campuses in our part of town, but because – like Mr. Whitman – I like to believe I hear something higher, and sweeter, amid the shuffling of feet and crinkling of voter guides and periodic bellowing from the volunteers up at the front of the line.
Our line winds around flower beds, beneath the dark shade of some ficus trees, past a bright and chuckling fountain. A broad green yard is spotted by shadows of birds flying endless, joyful circles in the early morning breeze. And, step by step, we saunter along … waiting our turn to flex our little electoral muscles for the cause, the candidate, the state and the nation.
I love the types that always stand in line around me. The talkative fellow – a little nervous, eager to feel out who else is voting the way he is. The solemn sorts, fixed quietly on their choices, or perhaps on what’s at stake … or maybe on what they’re not getting done, waiting for the ambling line to move another small stride forward. The watch-checkers. The comedians. The complainers. The ones who brought their son or daughter with them. The sons and daughters – restless, watching, wondering what it’s all about. Tugging at their parents’ sleeves, asking their questions, curious what great mysteries await behind that great glass door, growing slowly closer.
The volunteers, too, have their dependable personalities. The cheerful older ladies, delighted to have their part in something big. The older men, more edgy, looking like someone talked them into something that sounded, at the time, a lot less complicated and a lot less all-day-on-their-feet.
The indispensably efficient ones, who know all the buttons to push on the machinery and the questions you’ll ask and the complaints you’re going to make, even before you say anything. And, now and then, some petty tyrant, enjoying their first command, bossing people this way and that and making imaginary decisions with self-conscious authority.
The volunteers, of course, reign in their own realm, inside, with all the boxes and papers and wobbly blue tables and black magic markers. Somehow, the bustling ID area is always warm and crowded and brightly lit, while the voting itself goes on in shadowy rooms better suited for romance – or a quiet nap – than reading tiny print and coloring in miniscule holes on shaky tables.
It feels a little lonely, standing hunched over, there in the fluorescent twilight, squinting at the endless names of judges and bureaucrats. The responsibility weighs on you. So does the vast anonymity of government … all those unknown, faceless people out there, making decision after decision, for years on end, with none of us much the wiser.
You wonder if this squinting and coloring really does any good. Makes any difference. Is worth the getting up early and yawning in line and walking in late to work, with your little round “I voted today” sticker beaming from your chest.
Some of these I’m voting for will win … and disappoint me. Many of those I’m voting against will blithely deflect my electoral enmity, protected by the countless thousands who don’t know what I know, haven’t done their homework, or really don’t much care, as long as the name they’re punching or coloring is matched to the party their parents and grandparents voted for.
But every tiny black dot offers a little prayer of hope. Hope that my candidate is all I believe him or her to be. Hope that this name-in-the-small-print will somehow win and then, at some future, crucial moment, suddenly draw on all this character I’m ascribing to them – to do something smart. Or brave. Or right.
And in that moment, maybe they will make that mysterious, elusive “difference” … just as we have, by giving them our prayerful, infinitesimal push toward destiny.
All of that waits at the end of the long, winding, shuffling line. Meanwhile, a volunteer up at the front appears, to holler some crucial instruction that most of us, farther down, can’t hear. The comedian behind me makes a little wisecrack. A brief murmur of laughter. The lady in front of me checks her list for the third or fourth time.
I steal my little glances at all these people I never knew were alive, an hour ago. Whose faces I won’t think to remember, an hour from now. We have nothing in common but a nagging sense of duty, and faith that something bigger than our small sacrifices of time and effort is at work here.
I keep hearing young George Bailey’s voice, as he says, to the man who represents power in his small sphere of existence:
“Just remember this, Mr. Potter … that this ‘rabble’ you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.”
We, here in this little church courtyard, are the rabble, I guess. Most of us don’t entirely know what we’re doing. We flip stations when the candidates’ commercials come on. We listen to the sharp conversations in the break room, and glance too quickly through the gray voter guides.
We don’t know if the system is holding together. We wonder if the number of good people – recording the votes and greasing the wheels and working all those levers up and down the system – outweighs the bad, anymore. We hope, and feel a little nobler for the hoping. We shuffle along in our patient lines, waiting to fill in our tiny circles.
Out over the green stretch of the church yard, the birds are wheeling and darting and soaring. Stretching their wings. Feeling their freedom.
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