e'll vote today. We're the ones with white hair or no hair. Some of us may walk strangely as if we were on parade. Others may use a cane, a walker, even a wheelchair or motorized scooter to get there. But we will vote.
We may be as fed up with the new media politics as our children and grandchildren, suspicious of candidates who listen to everyone but themselves, tack left and right because of the latest polls, speak in bland tripletalk, make promises we and they know can't be delivered. But we will vote.
Of course, we have special concerns. I just picked up a couple of prescriptions - $1,117 - and another medication won't be in until tomorrow. Another $300 or $400. And I've run out of coverage.
We are worried about Medicare and Social Security, but the reason we vote goes far beyond our self-interest. We vote because it is, for us, a privilege we will never take for granted.
We immigrated to the United States for escape and opportunity, or we are the children of immigrants, or we remember grandparents who told stories of the old country, pogroms and poverty and ignorance and no political choice.
We saw on newspaper maps as countries that fell one after enough from Nazi internal subversion and blitzkrieg attack. We can still remember the Japanese advance through Asia. We remember the Battle of Britain and how close it was. Democracy was not only threatened but usually lost in our early years.
We have become a cynical nation, and, as hokey as it sounds, many of us fought a patriotic war to protect the right to stand alone, behind a wall of curtains, and cast a secret ballot. I not only vote for myself but also for all those men who fought beside me and never came home to exercise the privilege they died protecting.
We may be refugees like our friend and neighbor Hans Heilbronner who escaped the Holocaust as a teenager. He will vote today. We remember the boatloads of refugees, and we may be related to them. We know that even those who arrived aboard the Mayflower are refugees here, escaped from an old world to a new. We will vote.
We don't remember when women couldn't vote, not many of us, but we do know that our mothers, aunts, grandmothers could not always vote.
Those of us born in the '20s or earlier remember the Great Depression, the mid-afternoon hump-shouldered slow walk home of men who had been let go from their jobs and how few laws protected the working men and women. We remember savings lost when the banks closed. No government insured savings accounts when we were young.
My father never worked a five-day week or an eight-hour day. He left before 7 a.m. six days a week and came home to supper after 7 p.m. He never was offered a retirement plan or a health plan at any of the many places he worked, and when he was fired, and that was often, there was no unemployment insurance. No Medicare. No Social Security.
We remember when school was a privilege. My mother went to high school. My father was taken out of school in October of the eighth grade. He was 14. Time to go to work. Minnie Mae's mother made it through fifth grade, her father through third before they had to try to bring home a day's pay.
There were few laws against child labor when we were young and no civil rights legislation until we were grown. Minnie Mae's schools in Kentucky were segregated, and we remember when the color of your skin allowed you to vote in much of the South. Voting was a privilege held by the few.
Our children and their children may take their education, and their careers (not jobs), their houses, automobiles, washing machines and dryers, summer and winter vacations, their TVs and computers and air conditioning all for granted.
We do not. My folks never owned a house, never drove a car, and I can remember the slow, regular wave of the hand fan on a summer porch. It sounds romantic. It wasn't.
We may not like everything the government has done or proposes to do. We may not like either candidate for president. But we know there are profound differences between the parties.
We also know from our personal histories how much government affects the quality of our lives. We do not take the hard-won secret ballot for granted. Today, we will vote.
