Sow Your Wild Votes
September 9, 2004

When a person turns 18, there's usually some rite of passage to mark the occasion: a grand tour or a debutante ball. Some kids look forward to their first car, their first credit card, their first year of college.

On the day I turned 18, I registered to vote.

The war in Vietnam was raging, and I couldn't wait to add my voice to the growing tide of dissent via the ballot box, now that the voting age had been lowered from 21. I was more interested in voting than driving a car—unheard of in L. A.—so my dad had to drive me over to the mall in Torrance, where we'd seen a voter registration table set up in the power tools department of Sears. Talk about a power tool! Anybody could march in the streets and wave around a sign, but in those days we understood that the best way to make your opinion really count was to vote.

Politics was alwas a hot topic among my parents, aunts and uncles, and my mom always volunteered at the neighborhood polling place. When I was about eight, I was shocked to hear my mom utter a caustic remark about Eisenhower, whose grandfatherly faced had beamed down on me from every classroom of my entire life. When I was in the fifth grade, my mom took me out of school one morning to go see presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in person on a campaign stump through the South Bay. I stood up in a shopping cart in the May Co. parking lot to see over the throng of cheering people as Kennedy rode by.

This was the dichotomy I grew up with: the GOP was the party of old, bald white guys, and the Democrats were the party of vibrant young men with hair. Of course, politics had become much more complex by the time I finally reached voting age in the summer of 1970. Two Kennedys and a King had been assassinated. Students, the poor, and the disenfranchised were rioting in the streets. Kids my age were getting killed, not only in Vietnam, but in places like Kent State. To my generation, voting was literally a matter of life and death.

But these days—of all times!—people have to be persuaded to vote. Untapped voting blocs—young mothers and single women, minorities, youth—need to be courted. Politics isn't sexy enough. It's just another channel they can switch off when they get bored.

In a way you can't blame them, what with the non-stop Americana spectacle parading across our TV screens this summer: the Reagan funeral, the Democratic and Republican conventions, the Olympics. It was pretty much business as usual over on the Democratic Channel, with safe-choice Kerry "reporting for duty." (So much for positioning himself as the alternative to the "war president.") Then Illinois firestarter Barack Obama came along and jolted the whole thing to life. That's who I want to vote for! How come he's not running for president? Or what about Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe? Okay, he's an Aussie, and us patriots were all supposed to be cheering ourselves silly for Michael Phelps, but for nerve, grace under pressure, quiet competence and absence of arrogance, Thorpe is everything we could want in a leader that we're not getting at the present moment. An Obama/Thorpe ticket—that would lure reluctant voters out of their little hobbit-houses.

But you can't always get what you want back here on terra firma. In general, non-voters seem to be divided into three groups: those who just don't give a damn, those who believe both major parties are so corrupt there's no point voting for either one, and those who believe Martin Sheen already IS the president. But those uninterested in the dog-and-pony show that is national politics need to understand that they just can't switch it off like bad TV and escape unscathed; politics affects all of us, whether or not we participate. And while it's certainly true that both parties are run by huge, slick, conglomerate machines, it's a fatal mistake to believe there's no difference between them when it comes to policy. As colorless a candidate as he may have been, it's hard to imagine any scenario in which Al Gore's response to 9-11 would have been a "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq.

Sure, I'd feel better if Kerry's Iraq strategy were actually different from Bush's; if he were proposing a plan for peace, say, instead of vowing to send even more troops. You'd think someone who survived (and later protested) Vietnam would get it. But there's so much else at stake in the upcoming election: health care and school budgets, reproductive rights, gun control, environmental protection, the freedom of the press, our shrinking civil liberties, our plummeting economy, to say nothing of the plummeting reputation of America as a power and a people in the larger world beyond our borders. Surely one of more of these issues touches the life of every American citizen, however disaffected.

The last day to register to vote in the November elections is October 18—less than six weeks away. Register now. Don't let somebody else decide who'll be running your country.