Vote, people!

Yesterday, I voted in a minor California election. There were some important ballot issues about the government’s permission to seize personal property. Then we had some judicial and school board races. As always, I am amazed that I can cast a ballot for things that affect me, but in the late afternoon, I was saddened that the poll volunteer told me only 79 voters in my affluent neighborhood had preceded me. What?!

Women gained the right to vote in 1920, a few months before my mother, Blossom, was born in an obscure cotton-ginning town in Arkansas. She’s nearly 87 now, and proudly told me about casting her vote in the recent historic primaries. She’s a tiny person, only 4′6 and 80 pounds. But she will never waste the opportunity to vote, not when she barely had the chance, and her mother and grandmothers didn’t have it at all. And so many African Americans have had the chance for even less time — what an example Obama’s nomination has become.

Because of my parents’ ages (born in 1921), and my historian dad’s interest in Jim Crow laws, I have always been grateful for my right to vote — denied women, and also men, in much of the world even today. I was eager for my 18th birthday for some of the wrong reasons — but also this one. On Feb. 2, 1978, I waited for the old Chapel Hill library to open at 11 am with my brother Bruce alongside, and proudly filled out my voter registration. I left clutching my new voter card — and I still have it, Carolina blue with an embossed metal plate — feeling like an adult and participant in American society. I wish this for every young, and every old person, in our free country; two years later, I cast my first ballot, for Jimmy Carter. Let’s vote! It’s an incredible right so many do not have.

What if each one of us signed up one new voter?