Do you vote in political elections?
Every November and even some random months, I can’t remember. I would go with my mom to the small Baptist Church at the corner of our neighborhood and we vote. When I was little, I asked her why we were doing this and she said it was to help pick the rules. When it came to voting on bills, she made her selections. But for the local officials I asked were they and she said judges and school board members and other people. And I asked again, “who are they?” Sometimes she would shrug and say I don’t know another time. However, if she knew who the person was, she wanted to vote for them. If she didn’t know, she would let me pick a name that I liked. Hopefully, I was good at picking names when I was a child.
When I turned 18 years old, I had already registered to vote. My 18th year was a presidential election. Unfortunately, I could not vote. I remember looking at the calendar and cursing my birthday because election Tuesday fell 2 weeks before my birthday. I was so mad I couldn’t take part in the election.Some of my friends or classmates told me “you know your vote doesn’t matter right.” And I looked at them and I said “yeah it does.” They said, “Your vote doesn’t really matter when it comes to the president.” I was confused and asked, “What about local bills and laws? We’re voting for officials that go to DC and to Tallahassee. Voting involves more than just deciding who the president will be.”
I’m not sure how everybody was raised or what history they were taught when they were children. But my parents always instilled in me that it was our right to vote and that we need to take advantage of it. Because if you didn’t vote, you couldn’t complain. And another thing, women had just earned our right to vote.
I was born in 1986, that’s only 60 years after women earned the right to vote. This generation that I teach seemed to be a little disconnected from the reality that we’ve only had the right to vote for the last hundred years. To them, 100 years seems so long ago. But when I was their age, there were women alive who remembered not having that right. And it’s not even just about the right to vote that we fought for, because it was a fight. It’s everything else that comes with it. I’ve heard stories about my friend’s Aunt, who, despite having a full-time job with better pay than her father, still needed him to co-sign for her house. That is one generation removed from the women who fought for our right to vote.
I grew up reading books and watching documentaries about America’s history. Some books were fiction, and I thought their stories were exaggerated and what women dealt with. It was hard for me to believe that men would cast stones at women, drag them through the streets and lock them up because they wanted to vote. I thought surely that was something that was only hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Not something that would have happened 66 years before my birth. But I watched the documentaries, listened to first-hand responses, saw the pictures.
How could I not vote?
Recently, and by recent I mean maybe only three years ago, my great aunt, who does a genealogy for our family, posted a picture of a woman on my Facebook feed. She wore a dark fitted dress with a high white collar, little buttons ran down the center, and a pocket watch chain hung at her hip. This is one of my relatives who would come over from Ireland in search of a better life. She worked as a maid for a rich family in New York City. All, while being a part of the suffragette movement, she fought for our right to vote, because she just left a country where women earned their right to vote in 1918.
So when I look at the prompt, and it asks, do I vote… The answer is unequivocally yes, it is quite literally in my blood.
