Facebook Publication Date: 11/8/22 17:11 PM

It’s been a rainy election day here in San Diego.

I have yet to vote!

I know that most people mail in their ballots, but I love the visceral feel of going to an actual polling place and casting my ballot.

People often want to know how I voted–which prop; which person, and while I don’t think of it as a secret, I also feel it’s a bit of a redundancy; in the sense that if you know me even a little and even if only through my writing and my videos, you should have a general idea of how I lean–and I don’t mean political party.

North Star, Front And Center. Infusing every single bubble.

So I would direct you to my overarching ethos. By now, having been able to cast a ballot for fully 41 years, I have, if not a cynicism, certainly less wide eyed wonder when I approach a ballot box.

Still, I will faithfully exercise the franchise.

Look.

I know the limitations of voting. I well know the truncated and often meager choices we are forced to parse out and discern; know how even good initiatives and good candidates can get diluted and co-opted. Years in politics, both grassroots and partisan have cemented this truth for me.

And the money. Dear lord. So much money. Money that sways and distorts. Money that all too often makes a mockery of the process.

Still, I vote.

I am a Black Woman. I am aware of the blood of those before me who fought, sometimes to the death, for the right for me to stand underneath the fluorescent lights at the community center, sample ballot in hand. I realize that in 1963, the year I was born in south Arkansas, the right of my grandmother and my mother to vote was mostly hypothetical, and grimly laughable; not until two years later did the right to vote, enjoyed by white women for over forty years up to that time, became more possible.

(More possible, but never easy, even now. Even before Covid, polling places with significant Black populations, in San Diego County at least, were closing–mostly in churches and also in the garages and living rooms of our neighbors. Until it was shut down, I walked the two blocks to visit a woman and her daughter and the polling team, who I grew to love and appreciate. The last polling day was like a wake. It longer to hug and commiserate than it did to actually vote. The florescent lights and bored poll workers from outside the community are not the same. They do not bear the fragrance and the fortitude of those black women in folding chairs on Klauber Street. Enough said. Not nearly enough said. )

I will make my choices, however Pyrrhic they may be, because I owe a great debt. And even if my choices cannot always move the needle further, they *can* keep the needle from lurching backwards–as is so easy and, in so many ways, probable, now that we live in the era of Jan 6, and conspiracy theories, and a now overtly politized Supreme Court.

So will I give you specifics? Probably, if asked. But I think the better query you might ask of me is: who have I been as I studied, who will I be as i confront my official ballot–and who will be tomorrow and in the coming days and weeks as votes are certified and another election is over.

But are elections truly over? We are still living with the ramifications and the reverberations of ballots cast from years past.

I need to remember who I am every day.

Because every day is a vote, Voting Day or Not.

Keep walking.

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