Dammit. Elections should be a joyous time.
The promise of generations fulfilled. Yes, and promises denied. My grandmother had no vote when she came of age.
Now, however, it’s about the fulfilling. So I remind myself of the joys when this draining exercise spirals toward consummation.
Each of us should be like those southern black students seen marching miles to vote, all vigor and sweat.
Lawmakers closed polling locations at North Carolina A&T and other historically black colleges. The students weren’t having it. At the stroke of early voting, they did what it took.
This wasn’t, by the way, the South of 1963. This was 2026.
Elections should be a celebration. One can understand the desire to get it over with, or even to disconnect entirely. And, then . . .
I’ll never forget a couple of self-satisfied students at my alma mater who were pushing “Vote for Nobody” – buttons and all – before the 2016 presidential election. I wonder how stupid they feel today.
Sometimes, considering the stakes, you just shake your head.
Then other images elicit a smile, a fist in the air.
As a columnist in Texas, back in the ‘90s I got a call from a teacher at the Mexia State School, a residential facility for people with a range of disabilities. She wanted me to see her students vote.
Not a play-acting vote. Not a cafeteria poll. This was for real. All of the students were adults. None had voted before.
She devoted herself, and they as well, to the issues that year. She heard mutterings that this was a bad idea. Were they able? Wouldn’t they be influenced?
Well, uh, that can be said of a lot of voters.
These new voters did their citizenly duty at Mexia’s Northcrest Church of Christ. After, they wore “I Voted” on their chests like Nobel medallions. On the bus back, they couldn’t stop talking about self-government.
This is the way it should be.
We should have leaders who treat voting like the celebrations that occurred when the great-grandparents of those North Carolina A&T students wielded their right for the first time because of bold members of Congress who sent the Voting Rights Act to Lyndon Johnson’s desk.
Instead, we have a president ever seeking to prosecute the baldest-faced lie in American history. As we vote, he’s a town prowler toward elections – hunched, peering in, wanting to know, “What’s going on in there?” Surely something fishy. It couldn’t be the people’s will.
Any election he or his party doesn’t win is rigged. Any vote tabulation in a state he can’t conquer is corrupt and corrupted.
He’s not alone in this. We’ve got a political party whose survival apparently depends on tamping down turnout and the participation of people of color.
Grand Old partisans have rejoiced at this Supreme Court’s evisceration of voting rights. Pursuant, they have set out to shunt as many voters as possible into powerless corners via gerrymandering and Election Day ruses. Black voters have paid attention. Early voting figures say it loudly.
The administration spits on states’ rights without a peep from Republicans who once made that a singular clarion cry. Yes, that’s you, Ted Cruz. You, Chuck Grassley. You, Mitch McConnell. Mitch? Mitch?
No citizen should ever wonder if his or her vote will count and be counted. Vast numbers of Democrats with mail ballots said they skirted the Post Office. What a commentary on the times. One person, and one only, is why anyone would think such a precaution is necessary.
All of this, yet I am in a celebrating mood as this election arrives. Indicators are that voters, including those young Blacks, are stirred by the umbrage of the ages. They won’t take it lying down. They will take it to the polls.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
