COLUMN: Exercising our right to vote

From Daniel Fienberg, "The Fien Print," Fall '98 From Daniel Fienberg, "The Fien Print," Fall '98Despite the Canadian flag sewn discretely atop my purple backpack, I trotted out, ballot in hand, to the David Rittenhouse Laboratory at around noon on Tuesday anticipating the crush of students and Penn employees similarly stealing a second at lunch to "do their civic duty." Sure, the article on the front page of the paper announced that only a quarter of all registered voters were expected at the polls, still, the event seemed somehow? off. I signed the voting form, walked into the booth and listened as the dingy gray/brown curtain enveloped me. "Lesser of two evils. Lesser of two evils," I kept repeating to myself. So I think I voted for some guy named Ivan Ilyich for governor and that made me uncomfortable. And then I voted against Arlen Spector -- for political reasons and not simply because I believe him to be at the center of the JFK cover-up. And I voted for Chakah Fattah because, well, it's always fun to tell my friends at other schools that I voted for Chakah Fattah. Though each vote I cast was backed up by political rationale far more complex than anything mentioned above, I took no pride in any of it. After the pure joy of my first election, in 1996, for the first time I truly understood why people could feel apathy toward the democratic process. Then I spoke with my parents. In every way possible, their voting experience was different from mine and different from so many of us in the Penn community voting at either DRL or via the impersonal system of the absentee ballot. You see, my parents voted for the first time on Tuesday. For 30 years my parents lived in the United States, worked in the United States and brought up their children in the United States. It was only earlier this year that my Canadian parents became naturalized citizens. My parents were filled with genuine enthusiasm as the big Tuesday approached. The fact that they felt no disappointment is a tribute to the fact that patriotism and the virtues of the electoral process still mean something, somewhere. Even if that somewhere might be as remote as southern New Hampshire. You see, democracy in New Hampshire means something different from anywhere else in the country. It is, after all, a state where "Live Free or Die" is a more than a clichZ, it's a state motto. Candidates back home are treated as heroes if they turn down federal funding for public kindergarten, because at least it keeps the federal government out of their hair. People here care because they know that every four years they become the center of the world's attention and that with the largest per capita state legislature (400-something members), they are always a true model for participatory democracy. My parents were lucky enough to have their nascent voting experience in this kind of environment. In this context in which it seems that everybody is a selectman or a state representative, people take pride in their vote because even if they're voting for true New Hampshire weirdos, they're voting for themselves. They know that every vote democratically cast is linked to their community and to themselves. "I felt utterly like a baby," my mother told me. "A lifetime of having cared about politics, but never having been entitled to say anything. It was a powerful feeling." My father just loved the carnival, and he returned to work to the congratulations of his colleagues, even though they knew that he had cast his vote for the "evil" Democrats on the ballot. Though he later experienced what he described as a moment of "existential doubt," wondering if he had checked all of the right boxes on the rather antiquated piece of paper that held his choice, he felt a part of a greater experience. In a community like this, people don't make the decision to go to town council meetings, they're drawn inexorably to them. They don't plan and plot to run for local office, it seems like something they're supposed to do and they want to do. I'm from a town where they have parades for all occasions and people actually show up. And where my father can play the oboe in the kind of town band whose big gig is the local pumpkin festival. He can hardly believe he's doing it, but he might not have really had a choice. I'm not really sure that the electoral process really inspires the same patriotism here on campus, but it still comforts me to know that somewhere things are done differently. We can all hope that this spirit flows out from the small towns and backwoods polls to all of our lives. Because somewhere there's a place where families pull up to drop their kids off at school only to find a huge crowd of eager citizens, ready to vote early and often. Somewhere the polling booths have red, white and blue curtains, embracing people in Americana. Somewhere you sign up and vote alongside the cop who cited you just last week for a busted taillight, your son's civics teacher and the owner of the quaint store down the road, aptly called The Homestead, where new video releases still rent for a buck a night. Somewhere you walk in the door greeted by the candidate dressed like Uncle Sam and exit the building by way of the bake sale, set up by an eager class of third graders. I hope that wherever you are in the future, you can find that somewhere for yourselves.