Voting Day

I had expected to awake with anxiety this morning. It is a big day, and I'm one of those who has been following this election for two years.
I find instead an unusual warmth outside for a Vermont November, more typical of early October when summer resigns itself to fall. When I look west to the lake there is a haze over it, but it is haze mixed with soft sunlight and particularly beautiful. I hear that many parts of the country will be oddly warm today...in Chicago they are expecting the temperature to reach 70.
I voted on Friday. I like the sense of community that comes from going to the polls, but I was anxious that something might come up so I quelled my anxiety by voting on Halloween. I remember now that it was a Halloween over 40 years ago that I first moved to Vermont.
My pregnant California daughter wanted to vote on Saturday but the early voting line was so long, and the rain so intimidating, she will go to the polls on tired feet after a long day at work. She will not be the only tired person there, I am sure. Tired feet have changed this country before...remember Rosa Parks.
I am so impressed by the television pictures of the long lines at polling places across the country. My local daughter tells me of the enthusiasm and dedication to vote by absentee of the patients in the hospice where she works. Surely the massive interest in this election, the enormous numbers of people voting, are going to cause polling place problems in some locations.
What stuns me about this as I think about it this morning is that we as a nation have "earned the right" to be cynical, to be disengaged. For the 50 somethings of my generation we have gone through the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, and 2000...and yet we think, whatever our political stripes, it can and will be different. We have been disappointed by Clinton and by Bush, but we think it will be different, or at least we think it CAN be different. As a child I was deeply impressed by the photos in Life Magazine of the civil rights struggle and the voting rights struggle. I read Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and watched women burn their bras.
While our society and our political process are full of imperfections, I am profoundly impressed this morning by the changes I have seen in my lifetime. And I am even more impressed by the "audacious hope" of the American people to stand in line, on tired feet, to exercise a right which has, in my lifetime, become almost universal in this country.