Testimonial

From a good friend:

last election day, it rained.

it was my third time voting in a major election. the first time, in 2000, i had planned not to vote at all. when i shared my designs with my roommate, deirdra, she nearly lost it. she was active in the college democrats. she understood voting to be a privilege that she couldn’t wait each time to exercise. i’ll never forget the incredulous look on her face.

so i registered, and i went. a guy in a hooded sweatshirt outside my polling place at david rittenhouse laboratories handed me a ralph nader pamphlet on my way in. “vote your conscience,” he said to me gravely. he might have even patted me earnestly on the shoulder, the way i remember the feeling. he couldn’t have known that i had almost no voter conscience at all. but still, i didn’t forget what he had said. when i got to the voting booth, i seriously considered voting for ralph nader before, with a pounding heart, i marked “al gore/joseph lieberman” instead. i didn’t vote for a single other thing on that ballot. i left all the rest of it blank, front and back. i had grown up in michigan, but i was voting for my first time ever at college in philadelphia. i didn’t know most of what was going on.

i can’t remember now my experience the next day. i just know what other americans know: counts and recounts, gore winning the popular vote, something rotten in the state of florida. i can’t imagine that in the short period of time between when deirdra convinced me to register and when george w. bush gave his first acceptance speech, i had come to care much at all.

four years later i was in graduate school, and, by then, a full term under president bush and a year in the graduate employees’ organization—the graduate teachers’ union at the university of michigan—had changed me. through geo, i was active in the effort to defeat proposal 2, an amendment to the michigan constitution that would prevent same-sex couples anywhere in the state from ever exercising their right to legal marriage. this time, when i went to fill out my ballot, my heart pounded again. this time, i know i bubbled in at least two spots: one on the front, and one on the back. and when i left my polling place, surrounded by the euphoria of having voted again—after spending weeks involved in an organizing campaign in a liberal town—i couldn’t imagine that what i had bubbled in with my black marker would do anything but make itself manifest, immediately and definitively, in the world around me.

somehow, on the night of november 2, 2004, i ended up on my parents’ couch in plymouth, michigan, watching the election returns alone. i remember sitting up all night with carmen harlan and devin scillian on local 4, until i couldn’t sit up anymore. then i remember lying down, eventually closing my eyes, falling asleep with the tv still on, nervous that, after four years of a bush administration, the results were not more obviously in favor of john kerry. i woke up the next morning to the news that kerry had conceded, and there, alone on my parents’ couch, i cried.

in two years, another proposal 2 threatened again the equity and access of the people of the state of michigan. determined to play some part in protecting affirmative action, i signed up to hand out anti-prop-2 literature outside forsythe middle school early on election day morning. i got there a few minutes late, so i decided to make it up by staying for a second block of time. just as the shifts were changing, it started to rain. i didn’t have an umbrella or raincoat, but it didn’t matter to me. for the first time since deirdra had submitted my voter registration in that first year of the new millenium, i was actively engaged in the process of voting, and well before i fed my own ballot into the machine.

when the crowds thinned out at forsythe, they moved me to bach elementary school. it was raining harder when i got to bach, and a lot of voters walking into the school gave me sympathetic looks as they walked past. a few of them even thanked me, which just about made my day, until there, on the corner of fourth and jefferson, a miracle happened. a man in a green car drove up next to me. he was wearing a gray business suit. i recognized him from when he had passed me before without speaking, on his way into the polling place. the man rolled down his window and handed me a small black umbrella. i didn’t know him, and earlier he had not said a word, so when i looked at him confused, he said simply, “i knew i had an extra one in my car. you looked like you could use it.” i smiled and thanked him, and as he drove away, i stood there on the corner of fourth and jefferson, underneath a small, black umbrella in the rain, and cried.

by yesterday, what was evident was that when i voted in the united states of america, the opposite always came to pass. two terms of a bush presidency, two intolerant proposal 2s, and all i knew to do in the weeks leading up to this election was to expect nothing. this year, the one thing i was sure of was that i refused to be alone. so after marking my ballot completely, front and back, i went to the geo office—the birthplace of my radicalism—and watched, with a few dozen other people, as my magic ballot marker worked, before my very eyes, for the first time ever.

my initial tears, it occurs to me now, were from a release of months of nervous energy. i realized then that i had not let myself believe anything: that barack obama would be elected president of the united states of america, or that he wouldn’t. i realized that i had been storing inside my body both hope and dismay. that for the last four years—from the moment i cried one morning on my parents’ couch, to the moment i was crying now—i had refused to think much about the presidency at all.

my second tears were because something i had bubbled in with a real, magic marker had, for once, come to pass. my third tears were for deirdra, because she had talked me into registering to exercise this privilege all those years ago. my fourth tears were because no person of color had ever before been elected president of the united states of america. my fifth tears were because barack obama just had, and his own grandmother had passed away just in time not to see it. my sixth tears were because alyssa touched me on the shoulder, and when i managed to put my head up to look at her, tears were streaming down her face, too. my seventh tears were because i glanced up from alyssa and saw jesse jackson crying on msnbc. my eighth tears were because this time, i was not alone. because every time i was about to stop crying, i looked around—in this birthplace of my radicalism—and there was megan, and tyler, and urmila, and charles, and paul, and kiara, and colleen, and they were crying, too. because for the first time in a long time—and i guess, for me, the first time ever—the person we had voted for had won. and that made us feel like we had won, too.

pulling away from a long, teary hug with me, tyler had shaken his head. “it’s been a long eight years,” he said, with a look on his face that told me his body, for all that time, had been storing both hope and dismay.

“no,” i responded, matching his expression, because i knew exactly what it meant. “it’s been a lot longer than that.”