Your vote today is magical

You get up in the morning, and you take a shower, and you wash your face and your hair – what there is of it, anyway – and you wash your armpits, and you wash your legs and your private parts and your feet, and don’t forget between your toes!  In the kitchen, you make yourself a cup of coffee, and if the paper is delivered, you go out in your apartment hallway or out on the stoop and get your paper and sit down to read the news.  If you’re working outside the home, by subway or car or foot, you go to the office and do your job.  At lunchtime, you eat your lunch.  After work, you go out to dinner, or you pick up something already prepared, or at home in the kitchen, you make your dinner.  Later, you might watch the news or one of your shows on network or cable or streaming television.  When you get tired, you change into your pajamas and you climb into your bed and go to sleep.

On election day, when you go to the polls, you’re casting a magical vote, because it’s not only your interests that you are voting for, it is everyone’s. You will have participated in something larger than yourself.  You can see and reach out and touch nearly everything else in your life, but voting gives you the power to affect others in ways large and small, minor and profound. 

Someone, someday, will not go hungry because you voted today.  A family will be able to rent or buy a home to live in.  A child will read a book that was under threat of being banned because of your vote.  A car will burn less fossil fuel or even none at all. because you voted.  The smokestack of a coal-burning power plant will emit less deadly pollution, or it might be torn down because after your shower and your breakfast and your workday, you went to the polls and cast a vote. The water in a stream will be clean, a forest won’t be cut down, the life of a nearly extinct desert lizard will be saved, a windmill’s blades will turn, a photovoltaic cell will use the sun to produce electricity.

These are the magical powers of our governing document, the Constitution, and our way of governing ourselves, democracy – that by taking the simple step of casting a ballot, our lives can be made better, and our selves can be transformed into each other.