John Carrier

It’s going to be a long day.

My wife and I woke up early this morning to vote.  We walked two blocks to our polling place, arrived around 7:10am (ten minutes after the polls opened), and waited in line approximately an hour and a half.  We conversed with a genial fellow in line behind us, and the weather was unseasonably pleasant (50’s, on the way to a high in the 70’s).  Some ladies from a local coffee shop pulled up in a station wagon and handed out free cups of coffee to the waiting voters.  Awesome.

I think this is the first time I voted first thing in the morning, and it was certainly the longest I have waited in line to vote.  I wanted to get it out of the way so that I wouldn’t be scrambling to vote tonight, but mostly I wanted the “I Voted” sticker so that I could hit as many Starbucks as possible over the course of the day.  See here for the low-down on local specials, and here for an interesting article in the LA Times on the commercialization of Election Day.

But now tht I’m done voting, all I have to look forward to is the results, and that’s going to take forever.  It’s going to be more difficult than usual to concentrate on work, and with no polls closing for like 10 hours, the only news to watch will be stories about voting disruptions, long lines, and other totally predictable bummers.

Nevertheless, I’m glad I got it done.  You should get it done, too.  This past weekend I was in New York visiting the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I had the good forture of spending Shabbat morning at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun.  After delivering a great sermon on parashat Noah, Rabbi Bronstein exhorted the congregation to be sure to vote today, recalling his childhood in an autocratic and anti-Semitic Argentina, reminding us that as citizens of a free and democratic country, we are not merely able but obligated to cast a ballot.

 Do it for free coffee, do it for Bronstien…I don’t care.  For God’s sake, vote.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.