once upon a time

Once upon a time, a country that was fairly young in the scheme of things held an election. Many people ran for many different offices, and many people whe weren't running also got involved by volunteering and giving money and providing materials arguing their positions, whether those materials were based in fact or in fantasy. The important thing was to be involved, and everyone seemed to want to be involved.

Corruption was alleged and sometimes proven, but usually just alleged. The newspapers ran stories that made good headlines and sold lots of newspapers and got lots of viewers on TV. But because so many were owned by just a few big companies, sometimes people ended up not knowing who to believe.

But at least they knew they could trust their neighbors. So when a neighbor from across the street told them who to vote for, they at least thought about it. People visited booths at little street fairs, and talked to people who wantered the sidewalks with clipboards. People did their patriotic duty and registered to vote.

However, some of those people didn't register to vote correctly. They filled out forms printed on the wrong weight of paper. They filled out forms given to them by workers who sometimes threw away their voter registerations instead of sending them in.

Then, even those that did register to vote, were sometimes told that they weren't. Or that it was
too dangerous to try to vote, because they might be arrested. These tricks were sometimes recorded and warned about in the media, but they didn't really have enough time to go too into it, because other things were happening, too. Like big movie stars and musicians were visiting promoting candidates. Or important singers were caught lip synching on live television. Or Bob won the biggest pumpkin contest. These were important things to let people know about, too, and the traditional media just didn't have time for all the other stuff. More and more people had to go to a new place for news: blogs. Blogs of course are run by humams for the most part, not big corporations. As a result, sometimes the blogs had information that was true, and sometimes not. And, many times, whethere on not the blogs told it true, there was no way to know, because they didn't back up their assertions with any facts or proof.

So, a country got ready to vote. And, for the first time in this little country's history, more people were worried that their votes might not count than people who weren't worried at all.

Anyway, Scott was reading stories out loud to me last night, about various goofing-with-voters stuff going on, on the part of both the Republicans and Democrats (and probably Independents and Libertarians and Greens, too, but those poor guys never make the news as much as the biggies). It's been a horrifying last couple of weeks (months, years?) and I wonder how we're supposed to maintain our status of so-called model of democracy around the world when we seem to instead be a model of indemocracy.

How can we look each other in the eye, when so many people in this country just want to work as hard as they can to KEEP their neighbors from being part of this election?

So.

Vote if you can. And if you're worried that "They" might not let you at the polls, give it a try anyway. What the heck.