Since I had some time this morning before plunging into my day, I took the Girls voting with me. I explained to them the difference between a primary and a general election. I heard that Daughter #1 and her friends had been discussing politics. All of her friends would vote for John McCain, apparently because Obama and Clinton “hate Lilly”. This isn’t odd because a plurality of the parents at their school work at Eli Lilly & Co. It’s so much a part of the fabric of Indianapolis that people say that they work at “Lilly’s”, as if it’s the corner drug store. And, in a sense, it is. Daughter #2 says, “Billy met Obama, Joanie met Clinton, and Mary met McCain.” So, they’re being politicized from an early age.
The big loss is that of the big Ka-CHUNK style voting machines. Yes, we’ve forsaken the hanging chad, but there was nothing in the world like the old-school things. Now, it’s a computer screen, which the girls can see anywhere — just another video game. Bring back the automat!
A random thought that’s been floating around my head for months. The media has been flinging the “Obama’s middle name” thing around like it’s a bad thing. But isn’t it the greatest F-U to those who would seek to destroy us that we can have a President sporting one of “their” names, and still be a pluralistic society, and still kick their asses? It’s like ripping someone’s arm off and beating them with it.
When I was a senior in high school in your fair city (which I lived in on three separate occasions because my dad was a Lilly lifer), our school administration decided to rent real voting machines, the kind with curtains and levers, for the student council elections (our school had about 4000 students, so this might actually have been worthwhile) so that we could learn how to use them. That was the one and only election where I got to use a real live voting machine and I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. I voted absentee while in college (and for a year or two afterwards because I was too lazy to figure out how to change my voter registration) and then got stuck with Chicago’s hanging chad system. Out here in the suburbs, they give us a ballot and a black magic marker. And I have to say, it just doesn’t feel like voting. It feels like an elementary school art project. Where’s the pomp?