Well, it's been nearly three weeks since the election, and after the op/ed-page-triggered spastic sobbing fits, frivolous spending sprees and spontaneous ranting soliloquies had subsided, I thought my grieving process had run its course.
But then, I heard a disturbing anecdote which ignited the indignation anew: My mother recently told me one of her coworkers, a 24-year-old woman, had admitted to staying home on election night and not voting because, I kid you not, she would have had to have gone to the polling place alone.
I don't know, perhaps she had heard whisperings of Republicans in green jackets out to disrupt the process by pouncing upon unsuspecting voters with suppressive antics and big, pointy teeth. But they do that all the time.
Maybe it was the Democratic poll-watchers that scared her away-who knows what was really baked into those homemade confections? And I know I wouldn't want to run into one of those elderly pollworkers in a sparsely populated corridor, hoo boy.
Yes this dependent, victim mentality so many of our generation accept, adopt and abet has got to be one of my paramount pet peeves, right up there with \every day"" appearing as one word when it's not an adjective. To date, the most annoying example I had witnessed was a woman in the grocery store pulling out her cell phone to confirm that Ritz crackers were indeed the round ones, in lieu of looking at the box before her.
But seeing the same force responsible for those summertime Langdon Street excursions to the park-where you expect to see them all holding onto one of those kindergarten field trip ropes-asserting its wicked wiles on the electoral process has at last led me to conclude this sheep syndrome has simply gone too far. Sure, part of me wants to say, fine, let these types stay home, they would have just been more fear-driven Bush votes anyway; or, if you don't vote, you deserve the ""leadership"" you end up with. But we all end up with it, and if we can't stand up for ourselves on the small things, someone else is going to keep deciding the large things for us-and we've all seen what 51 percent of this nation endorses to do that.
So, taking a stand means occasionally having to do something by yourself. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, you don't need another person-or two or seven-with you to use a restroom, sit in a darkened room and watch a screen for two hours or flat-out venture out of your flat. (Trust me, I walk around alone at all hours all the time, and the only thing I've crossed the street to avoid out of some scant sense of self-preservation lately was that blasted hug-happy Bucky Badger mascot trolling the streets during Rock the Vote.) Why, pray tell, could you possibly need another person with you to vote?
Soapbox aside, it's a freaking secret ballot. For now, at least-if no one has tried it already, it's only a matter of time before somebody challenges the very concept by bringing a cell phone into the polling booth: ""I'm in the booth-I am IN the BOOTH. Hey, George Bush-that's the one who will hurt pretty much everyone and everything relevant to my life in the long term, but will protect the unborn and keep the gays from marrying and stuff, right?""
Ain't democracy grand.
