EDITOR’S NOTE: Or the Oregon Version – Who Are You Really Voting For? Since we don’t go to the polls, and have the luxury of voting in our own homes. This is bigger than us. Please vote, and be sure to return your ballot to a ballot box – see list of locations below.
~ Written by Travis Baldwin and
Inspired by John Pavlovitz
I Wasn’t Alone In The Voting Booth Today
I went to the polls to cast my early vote in the most consequential election of my lifetime, perhaps of this nation’s lifetime.
And while I entered the voting booth by myself, I was not alone there.
I brought a silent multitude with me.
I brought the Dominican father shot in his car by ICE agents while his terrified child screamed in horror.
I brought the gay teenager in West Virginia who is terrified of revealing his truest truth.
I brought every child and woman brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators.
I brought the tens of thousands of children killed in Gaza.
I brought the Mexican couple who are terrified of being deported.
I brought Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
I brought the suffragettes.
I brought our overworked and underfunded public-school teachers.
I brought the exhausted parents of a terribly sick child who face bankruptcy paying her medical bills.
I brought Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks, and John Lewis.
I brought the transgender woman in from the shop near my home.
I brought every Jane Doe from every college campus.
I brought the black boy in his school library who deserves to see himself in the stories he reads.
I brought the neighborhoods gerrymandered out of the political process.
I brought the amazing Jewish and Muslim families in our neighborhood.
I brought the Little Rock Nine.
I brought the Wisconsin grandparents who stand on their small-town main street every Saturday to oppose fascism.
I brought the children and teachers murdered in their classrooms.
I brought the disabled woman at our church whose economic supports are vanishing.
I brought Anne Frank and Greta Thunberg.
I brought the crafters of our Constitution and those who still defend it.
I brought the honeybees and the sea turtles and the red wolves.
I brought the theatre kids and the theatre departments who make magic for the rest of us.
I brought the high school students who refuse to allow their immigrant classmates to be bullied.
I brought the pregnant women at the precipice of death in a Texas hospital room.
I brought my indigenous brothers and sisters.
I brought Emmit Till and Breonna Taylor and Nolan Wells.
I brought the young soldier on his way to a war of choice in Iran and the homeless veteran discarded by his government.
I brought the Stonewall rioters.
I brought the young girl who imagines she might one day be the President and will.
I brought the wife that I lost to breast cancer and sepsis.
This is true for each of us.
We are not just using our vote to speak for ourselves or those close to us.
We are leveraging that profound and sacred privilege to stand with every beautiful, vulnerable, never-to-be-repeated human being we hold within our hearts, every person we have admired from the distances of geography and time.
We carry every activist and serviceperson who spent themselves on behalf of those who would follow them.
We carry every person on the horizon of history whose names and faces we’ll never know, but who will inherit the nation we leave them.
We cannot stay home or opt out or cast our votes carelessly.
So yes, vote your morality. Vote your ethics. Vote your values and your passions and your core truths but vote because you aren’t alone when you do.
This is so much bigger than us, friends.
Who do you care about?
Who are you fighting for?
Who does your heart break for?
Who do you believe deserves to be heard?
Who are you living for?
Who are you bringing to the polls?
