On voting today

Tue 4 Nov 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Thanks to everyone who bought books from Small Beer Press and helped us donate money to the Obama Campaign. We donated $539, $138.60, $144.80, $30, for a total of $852.40. Thank you.

Living in Northampton, Mass., our votes don’t really matter. Obama won this town in the state primaries and will win it again. The state will mostly vote for the Democratic party and John Kerry, despite his utterly useless campaign 4 years ago, will get re-elected. The next couple of years don’t look pretty here. The state is making cuts, the city is making cuts, our local hospital is letting go 75 people today. No one is expecting that in an Obama presidency great things will happen immediately (apart from the great thing of him being elected) but everyone knows that he is a much better choice than 4 more years of McCain/Bush.

It won’t make a difference, yet everyone knows voting matters. So this morning we walked down to the voting station at the local elementary school. We had our water bottles and something to read in case there was a queue. We were ready to wait in line (thanks Gwenda) to make our marks and take part in this amazing day.

Voting goodiesBut there was no wait. There were two voting booths open and we took them. In all it took maybe five minutes to get in and out the door—and that includes a couple of minutes wandering up and down the bake sale fundraiser for the defense department (now that all the government monies are being redirected to education and health, wait, maybe that happens next week, so maybe this was a fundraiser for the school).

We did our part for them (that apple walnut bar was verrry good) and ate our chili and corn bread outside basking in the late autumn sun and enjoying the sound of the kids chanting “Obama!” How about you? How was your vote?