The first time I woke up today, I was on a watery precipice in a vivid dream-mare. All of my loved ones and I were huddled together on the deck of a Titanic-like ship. A giant blue storm roiled around us, a terrifying drop was too quickly approaching our bow, and our captain, the always-hero José Andrés, was trying valiantly to keep our spirits up despite our impending doom. Several intense parents that I know in real life were screaming about their children being the best, about winning. As we went over, as we started to tip.
Covered in sweat, I forced my eyes open, desperate to get off that ship.
We’re still on that ship, and as my dearest friend, K, said, “that dream takes no analysis.”
Fretful and hot, I fell back asleep for a few hours before waking again feeling like roadkill. I felt heavy, weighted, not normal. Yesterday, at the polling center, we’d joked that we’d all be sore today, exhausted. We weren’t wrong.
Suddenly it is 6pm, and I don’t know how I navigated today. I met with a student, read work for another, had a new-client call, raked. I laughed with our contractor, ordered screen door hardware. And yet, it is all a blur, a few Tweets in an endless doom scroll of realizing how much of this country likes racism, likes inequality, seems to thrive on cruelty and conspiracy, voted for QAnon believers and Hitler enthusiasts.
Yesterday, my alarm went off at 5am. I was confused, it was dark, and then I thought, “Oh!” Tom offered to make me coffee while I dressed. Knowing they wouldn’t be seen under my jeans and boots, I put on Resistance socks. Feeling it was a simple statement, I clasped my VOTE necklace around my neck, silently thanking my dear friend, J, for such a gift.
I packed my glasses and bag of supplies that dear S brought over late after I’d gotten the call to work, kissed Tom, took my coffee, and drove to a community center I’d never been to before to start a day that in theory I’d been trained for feeling grateful for civic work as both a way to serve and as a distraction to a day that would otherwise crawl.
The boys are both playing video games with friends, loudly. They are in the same room, screaming into screens. And it is the worst cacophony and also the dearest, most innocent song of normal and naive perspective. I can hardly focus on these words as I type, the country seems to be burning, or drowning, around us, and though they are aware and disgusted and sad, they are also children who are in the moment and at ease with joy.
I signed in at 6:03am, clipped the Emily- Election Operations Judge tag to my shirt, and asked what I could do to help. “How about you start with ballot scanning?” Sure. Ballot scanning was a joy, and my little section’s co-workers, Peter, Anoushka, and Juliane, were wonderful. Peter’s a bit older than I am, Anoushka is a rock star high school senior, and Juliane is a sophomore in college. Our job was to ensure each voter’s authorization card (VAC) had been properly initialed at all previous stations, help them cast their ballot privately, thank them for voting, initial and file their VAC, and send them to the “I Voted” sticker table and exit.
Talking politics and even having a mobile phone near us were verboten, so we talked around politics and thought about how we’d start getting news once polls started closing. Many poll workers had worked during early voting or in years past. Some, like me, were brand new. Almost everyone was incredibly friendly. Everyone was earnest. Most had forgone the optional payment to work the 13+ hours we’d signed on for. We were all ages, races, gender, and faith. It felt like democracy at its best. Like the America we are and that I wish we’d celebrate and honor more often and by more of us.
An elderly Asian-American couple, arm-in-arm, walk towards us, ballot and cane in his hands, ballot and purse in hers. We gently separate them. Peter guides him to one scanner, I steer her towards mine. She needs my arm, and I give it. “I need him for balance” she tells me. “I can do that for you,” I reply. She asks me to help her vote, but I am not allowed to touch her ballot. “We’ll go slowly,” I say, “one sheet at a time.” I wish I hadn’t, but I see she votes for trump. I do not understand, and my heart pinches. I help her back to her husband and thank her for being a voter. I turn back to Anoushka, eyes downcast. “I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t understand at all.”
The same happens with an older Black man, and later, when I’m working check-in, with an angry older white woman who demands that I look at her ID even though Maryland does not require one to vote. “I don’t like that,” she asserts. And I think I can read between the lines. I want to say, “Ma’am, voter fraud is really not an issue.” But instead, when she says, “I am FRUSTRATED,” I smile and say, “Well, let’s try to fix that.”
In addition to ballot scanning and checking in voters, I get to work line management and greeting. We don’t ever have any real line, so we get creative with greeting. Daniele, Jana, Sabrena, and another woman decide to make a cheer for people walking in: “Are you here to V O T E?” They make each letter with their bodies, literally cheer via high kick and pom moves, and usher voters my way. I direct folks to check-in stations. Many are first-time voters and/or need to register. First-timers warrant celebration.:“First time voter” I call through cupped hands, and the center erupts in cheers, applause, and woot-woots!
A father has brought in his just-of-age son, a granddaughter has brought in her grandparents, a mom with royal blue hair brings her little boy with her with a smile as big as they get. Many bring notes, Ziplocs of voter-information paraphernalia, their time and research and civic duty carried tightly in hand.
A Spanish-speaking couple come in, dressed to the nines. She is gorgeous and glowing, in stilettos and full make-up. She is clutching a tiny American flag in her hand, and she doesn’t put it down once: not when she’s registering, waiting, sitting at the provisional voting table, stationed at the provisional electronic machine, walking out. We cheer wildly for her.
We go nuts for the teenagers, just 18 and 19, who are taking this seriously. I laugh and nearly cry when one boy gasps as he realizes that there is a second page full of amendments, when he laughs, says “Naw!”, when he keeps reading, and votes for every one.
We raise the roof for the quiet middle-aged woman who has never voted before, who has limited English, but who tells me in a hushed tone “I WILL make my voice heard.” We cheer for the incredibly pregnant woman with two other kids in tow who didn’t mind that I played with her sons while she checked in, for the incredibly pregnant-for-the-first-time woman voting with her parents, for the Mom in her Biden shirt who brought her kids back just to see what you do and what’s involved “because soon enough, they’ll vote too.” I wish you could have seen her daughter, 14 and proudly wearing a Kamala shirt, looking around the room, doing the math on just how soon she’ll get to participate.
About twelve hours in, a father walked in, hand in hand, with his son who was maybe 4. The little boy had a head of curls, big eyes behind big glasses, a somber expression of purpose. I sent them to a check-in station and was surprised to see them later. “But you already voted! Is everything OK?” The dad tells me, “the one thing my boy wanted to do was touch the paper. And I was so nervous and eager that I cast my ballot before he could touch it. Do you have any paper he can touch?”
I knelt down and asked the little boy, “would you like to vote?” Sternly and silently, he nodded yes. I glanced over at Sasha, one of the amazing Sasha-Jordan-Stephanie-Diane team of provisional vote experts, and said, “Sasha, we have a voter here.” She passed me a blank e-ballot and I said to the boy, “Please take this and fold it in half. Now bring it to Sasha, because this is how you vote.” He went to her and sat in the chair she offered and put the blank in the machine and made it come out, and then we asked him to sign his name, and in his darling tiny hand, he took a pencil and earnestly wrote AMAUEL. “My name is Emanuel,” and we cheered and gave him an I Voted sticker and smiled at his wonderful father and nearly burst into tears.
Only one voter refused to don a mask. We kept him in the lobby while he screamed angrily at one of our chiefs. The situation was finally resolved. We gaped when people momentarily de-masked, for how different do people look in the absence and then sudden reappearance of noses and mouths and expressions beyond eye crinkles? And what are we missing right now? The loss is acute, even as we all try to minimize the distance and anonymity perpetuated by veils of safety.
In the break room, Ariel told me how much she loved to teach but how hard it was to do so via Zoom. How despondent she is to hate her job right now when all she’s ever wanted and loved is teaching. How good she is at it.
I finish my meal and ask where I should work. “You are awesome at greeting,” one of the chiefs says. So I return to that station, but Sheri and Rachel are also awesome at greeting, so I just sit for a minute and rest, looking around at this profound expression of civic engagement which is, essentially, an expression of both hope and commitment to America’s intricately-crafted quilt of social connection and duty that I know is frayed but hope is strong enough to last a few years more.
Even though we cannot talk politics, it is abundantly, easily clear that most everyone working is progressive and blue, desperately worried, vexed, and determined. We talk about how voting and the census are largely volunteer efforts on a grand scale for an idea. As night falls and we start closing shop, we talk, in hushed tones, about how in the face of the American idea, trump is as some pundit said today, “not an aberration but a mirror.” How do we reconcile that?
How do we understand the elderly folks of all backgrounds who vote for more trump? The young ones who do they same? The folks of color who cast their ballots for a man and party who disdain them completely? Do they not know? Not care? Have they internalized disdain of themselves? Do they feel they earned a piece of the pie and worry about sharing it? Is it Fox News disinformation? Is it xenophobia towards other Americans? Is it hardship? Is it machismo? The “promise” of a better tomorrow? Is it, simply, that many Americans actually just like what trump represents? That they are cool with racism, bigotry, misogyny, inequality?
The answer is probably all and none of the above, at least as is experienced and understood by many. In working yesterday, in not knowing (although sort of knowing) who stood for what but who worked for a greater purpose regardless, I felt a connection I don’t often feel. I felt the argument of there being more that connects than divides us. But when I got home and the fatigue set in and the high-bubble burst, I realized too that real life challenges connection differently. We can kumbaya til the cows come home, but daily life is different. Differently hard, differently financed, differently informed, differently experienced. And absent an umbrella “greater good,” the daily differences carry more weight.
I cook dinner and tell the boys and Tom all of these things. They quiet, unnaturally, and listen, and hug me and their eyes glisten. And I know what they’re feeling and mourning and hoping. I feel it all, too.
Today, while texting with dearest K, I said, “What do we do if he wins?” Later, she asked, “What do we tell our kids?” I answered, “The truth. That this is a broken country with many really good people but not enough. All of us have been lied to for decades, spoon-fed bullshit about American exceptionalism, and look where it’s gotten us.”
It’s gotten us to a place of deluded grandeur. To a sense of self-worth that is not rooted in reality or warranted in most ways. Add 90% of American Christianity to the mix, and you’ve got a dangerous amalgam of white supremacy, entitlement, misogyny, and suspicion of science and fact coming at your like a wall of mighty Huns. Add Fox News, and you’re fucked. We’re fucked.
Biden will likely, deservedly, mercifully win the Presidency. But the Dems won’t take the Senate, and McConnell is an evil beast, and so we have, at best, two years of horrific gridlock ahead. All the while the Earth will continue to die, and economic inequality will continue to widen, and Americans, all those who spent time at the polls, patiently waiting, carefully completing, hoping, and taking seriously their Constitutional right of voice and action, will suffer.
As is/should be voting, public education is and should be a right. But an equally tended and supported one, regardless of SES or race or location or whatever. The only way forward is truth and courage. Fact and earnest assessment of it. We have been and remain a racist, unequal nation with an enormous amount of potential. We are great in some ways, and we can be great in more. But only by being honest with ourselves and our kids and by saying NO! to falsehoods and bigoted ideas, by issuing consequences for cheating and lies, by demanding of ourselves that which we demand of others.
Until then, we will list, left and right. We will disappoint the ideals we profess to hold dear. We will dishonor all who have believed in and given their lives for them.
The work is hard. It is constant and taxing and it often feels Sisyphean. But I believe that if you’re not working and acting and trying, you are tacitly accepting the damning inequality that is an albatross around all our necks. You deserve better. I deserve better. Our kids sure do. And the health of our planet can’t wait.
As we wait to know who will next steer our ship, please rest. And then ask what you can do. How can you help? Is it jumping in to support the Dems facing run-offs in Georgia? Go Ossoff! Go Warnock! Is it volunteering your time at a community center, virtually or in person? Perhaps you’ll run for school board or you’ll start a student activist group, like Anoushka has. Maybe you’ll just be a presence in your community, restoring strength to the quilt in all the ways needed. You’ll bring a meal to someone, thank you SJ! You’ll lighten a load, you’ll listen differently.
Please, be, microcosmically, the country you want to see. For Amauel, for the first time voters, for the veteran ones, for all of us.
