"I Voted"

I liked the year when the small "I voted" stickers came along to be worn throughout the day as a reminder for others to get out to vote. I wasn't always pleased with the choices but I remembered my mother's stories of suffragettes. Having grown up in a family in which unconditional love was the norm, I couldn't fathom that women had been treated so chauvinistically, although I didn't know that word at the time. I am currently reading The Help and since the setting is one I'm familiar with (Jackson, Mississippi 1962) while I was at Louisiana State University (where I had gotten myself branded as an outside agitator), I am really enjoying the perceptive, humorous, heartbreaking, detailed nature of the book. Coincidentally, on the Sojourner's site, I read this very moving passage. I don't ordinarily put such a long segment on my posts but there wasn't anything I wanted to cut out of this one.

Voting in Honor and Solidarity by Valerie Elverton Dixon 10-28-2010 When my children were young, I took them with me to vote. Before we went into the polling place, I said to them, “We vote because somebody died so we could have the right to vote.” Now I think the reason we vote is because somebody lived so we could have the right to vote. This year I will cast my vote in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamerwas a hero of the civil rights movement. She was a sharecropper in Mississippi in 1962 when she attended a meeting on voter registration held at a local African-American church sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After hearing the presentation, she knew she wanted to vote. She remembered the occasion: ”Whey they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high up as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” Her decision had profound consequences for her and for her family. The plantation owner ordered her out of her house. The family that took her and her family in was targeted with gunshots in the night. She and others were taken to jail where she was beaten so badly that complications from that beating, along with breast cancer, took her life a few years later. Despite all this, she was a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and in 1964 challenged the credentials of the all white Mississippi delegation. They refused a compromise that would give the MFDP two seats. She said: ”We didn’t come for no two seats when all of us is tired.” Not only did Fannie Lou Hamer work for voting rights, but she wanted to see African-American history taught in schools; she worked with Dorothy Height and the National Council of Negro Women to start day care centers, and she was active in a Freedom Farm Land project. She traveled throughout the United States telling the story of the struggle for freedom, including speaking before Malcolm X’s organization. One of her more famous quotes is: ”I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” But not only will I cast my vote in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer and her lifelong commitment to the struggle for human dignity, I will cast it in solidarity with men and women across the globe who do not have the privilege of going to the polls to help select the leaders of their countries. I will cast it in solidarity with this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Liu Xiaobo, who sits in a Chinese prison. The Nobel committee said: ”Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China.” I will cast it in solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who is scheduled to be released from house arrest after Burma’s November 7 election. I will cast it in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe, still suffering under the leadership of Robert Mugabe.

Our politics is often ugly to behold, but our right to vote is a sacred privilege and duty. Somebody lived and somebody died so we could have the privilege. And, it is our duty.

Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon is an independent scholar who publishes lectures and essays at JustPeaceTheory.com. She received her Ph.D. in religion and society from Temple University and taught Christian ethics at United Theological Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School.

I vote as much to honor the past as to steer the future. I often hear, "What should we do when the choices seem equally disagreeable?" For example, in today's election, I had to choose between one candidate whose moral values are not mine but whose affiliation is, or another whose party I endlessly decry, or a third whom I like a lot but who can't possibly win. However, if I "made a statement" by voting for him, that's one more nail in the coffin for seeing my opinion count. Another statement would have been to not vote. I'm going to let you guess what I did! One thing for sure: I voted. I didn't want my mother following me around with a whole bunch of poetry.

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...may the blessings of thinking through what needs to be done and then doing it be yours...