Voted Today

Today the Virginia Democrats are holding their primary to choose candidates for Governor and Lieutenant-Governor.

It is a pleasant day, bright and warm though not scorching. Still what a contrast with last November! Then there was a long line stretching around a corner in the front of the building, and I had to wait for half an hour, while on the approaches to the polling place there was scarcely an inch along the edges of the road and the parking lot that wasn't taken up by a stream of campaign signs.

Today there was not one sign to be seen anywhere, and there was only one car in the parking lot, waiting to pull out. And the whole time I was there, actually just a few minutes, no one else showed up.

It was the most deserted primary I have seen so far, and I guess the general thinking is that all three candidates, or all six counting the Lt-Govs, are so evenly matched that it matters only to them which one wins.

It seems as if there's been something to have to vote for each and every year lately, and I was tempted to pass up this one myself, for the first time. But I never have any choice, no matter who is running and no matter how high the stakes are.

This is because earlier in my life, no matter how upstanding a citizen I may have been, because of my skin color in Virginia and because I was a D.C. citizen in D.C, I would not have been allowed to vote. And I always remind myself that, unlike for the great majority of people in the U.S., who take voting purely for granted and even as an unnecessary nuisance and waste of their time, I always have to remember that a lot of people had to march and be beaten and sometimes even killed, aside from suffering all sorts of other kinds of indignities, so that I would have the chance to vote. So not to do so, even one time, strikes me as being, in the case of myself and others like me, a betrayal not only of the duties of citizenship but also of all those civil rights workers of half a century ago and even today.

And speaking of even today, the people of D,C. are still so much under the thumb of all the baboon-butts from all the other states of the Union that they are still not properly represented in Congress. The causes of this highly unjust situation are historical and hard to understand, but it has boiled down to being mostly a racial and political thing. with the Republicans wielding the hammer. They know that such is their record that their chances of winning anything in D.C. are nil, far into the forseeable future. Therefore they fight vigorously any attempt to give D.C. two senators or even, as far as I know, a voting U.S. Representative, though its population exceeds Wyoming's, and maybe Alaska's, too..