I woke up early like it mattered. Every Tuesday, I wait until noon to complete two hours of online quizzes that are due at two o’clock. I always have all week to do this, but I always wait. I still don’t know why. November sixth was the only time I broke this habit by submitting everything the night before, since Monday is usually when I go to school, come back, and sleep all day. It seemed like nothing, but it felt very symbolic coming from a sedentary person like me. I thought that I had a good reason to care and prepare for Tuesday, that all of us did, everyone my age. For the first time, we didn’t just decide to vote in the 2018 midterm elections. For the first time in a long time, we all felt like we had to vote.
I began to dress, and carefully. Partisan stereotypes aside, I have never had a normal conversation with anyone about politics in my few years as a journalism student. Leftists seem loud and proud, Centrists try to simplify everything and don’t talk much, and Republicans are shy, often defensive. It’s a shame. Those of the Right in particular never seem like they want to talk to reporters, but I had to know what they thought, I was determined. I’d be carrying a microphone and a headset, so I tried to look as non-threatening as possible – I decided to put on lots of bright red, like a costume.
—–
My polling place is very close to me. On the drive there, I began to remember why I was voting. Our country is home to hundreds of millions of people, the weight of this society puts lots of pressure on us and clusters different communities into big and little veins of resources that would be mined that day. Why are these people sought after and harvested like gold, or overvalued and harvested anyway, like fool’s gold? At the end of things, the purpose of collecting these precious metals is so that they can be processed, sold back to the public to wear, and I didn’t want to wear fool’s gold for another four years.
But I had better reasons for voting than wanting to win. So many will vote just for the smug satisfaction of winning, so many treat all levels of politics like the same little games because they don’t risk losing anything. An older man likely wouldn’t find abortion rights more appealing, for example, than voting for the same party that his daddy voted for, and his daddy’s daddy before him. Not only wouldn’t it be directly beneficial to him, it would also break tradition, two things that so many are obsessed about when it comes to almost any choice, politically especially.
When the average person votes for terrible politicians who do terrible things, it’s often an exercise of proxies. The famed Milgram Experiments that began in 1961 showed Americans that 63% of subjects, average people, were willing to deliver a fatal electric shock to someone who they didn’t know because they felt it was required of them to do so, since the folks conducting these experiments promised the subjects that they would not be held responsible for any damages. effect was faked of course, there was no harm done by either kind of subject tested, those being people in the autonomous or agentic state as Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram called them. The latter, those who were considered “agentic,” were those who acted against their morality because they believed that they could pass off the responsibility for the consequences of their actions onto their authority figures who commanded them. But, what if the shocks were real?
A political opinion piece written by a fellow student at the University of Central Florida, a conservative student who seemed to me to be full of this agentic behavior. He defended his identity profusely, returning after every other sentence to his main point. He was a proud conservative, but not personally racist, sexist, or homophobic. My thought process while reading his work felt similar to what the autonomous test subjects may have been thinking before refusing to deliver any more shocks. In my case, I wanted to ask the student if he claimed to not be racist, or sexist, or homophobic, but still willingly chose to elect politicians who are well known for intrinsically racist, sexist, and homophobic policies, what’s the difference? To me there is none, and just as I desired to vote for the party I registered for, so too did I want to do the right thing, even for people who aren’t me.
—–
As I parked, I noticed that one of the lawn signs outside my polling place stood out. The sign was white and green, vastly different colors than the reds and blues everywhere else. It displayed a picture of a racing dog. “Love greyhounds?” it said, “V NO on 13.” Proposition 13 was of course the motion to ban greyhound racing, and voting no would really be a vote in favor of the controversial sport; looking closer at the ad, complete with a heart in place of the letter o in “love,” revealed that it was paid for by the Committee to Support Greyhounds in a last ditch effort to trick people into voting against their best wishes, trying to mine that vein of gold.
Finding it despicable, I took a picture of the sign so that I could accurately report on it. I noticed on my walk to the American Legion’s doors that an elderly poll worker, leaning against his truck, had been keeping a close eye on me. As he pushed himself off and started walking in my direction, I ducked into the building to get my voting out of the way and avoid worrying anyone else by acting too curious.
The process was straightforward as ever, identical to how it’s been every time I’ve voted. The iPads that were used to check me in were slow and the poll workers were already exhausted with something like ten hours left on their shifts, trying to do all of their work while sitting in chairs. I was at ease, I was finally here to make a difference. Going through my ballot, I was relieved to see that the wording of Proposition 13 was direct enough to dispel the big lie suggested by the Committee to Support Greyhounds. Still, my cynicism reminded me that somewhere, someone surely fell for it. Somebody was tricked into buying a fool’s gold necklace with the real thing. The proposition passed in the end, meaning that they luckily got a gold necklace instead, but the principle of the whole thing kept me angry, looking for more things to write about.
—–
I looked around for someone my age to interview, but the only person outside was the elderly poll worker from earlier. I approached him this time. I asked for his name, but he refused to tell me.
“You know how reporters are,” he said, “they say it’s off the record until you see it in the paper.”
I backed off on the formalities and settled for his permission to publish what he said as long as he felt comfortable saying it. After we sat down on a bench together, on a red bench in my red shirt and red shoes, he shared with me his life.
The poll worker, 74, has been living in Orlando for 50 years, but growing up in Rhode Island surrounded by Italians had given him a raspy accent similar to Don Corleone that was unique for this part of the country. From 1962 to 1968, he served in the U.S. Army Reserve at Fort Benning before going to work full time as a cook and Supply Sargent in the National Guard Bureau during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily, after being notified that he’d be going to Vietnam mere months into his incomplete basic training at the age of 18 and a half, he was spared from seeing any theater of war due in part to President Kennedy’s well-timed de-escalation efforts. Part of the reason too that he never fought was because of his older brother; he was already fighting, and their mother simply wouldn’t allow both of her sons to be in harm’s way at the same time. His brother served for twenty-one years in the U.S. Air Force, passing away in 2014 from Lou disease brought about by exposure to Agent Orange. The poll worker remembered his brother and spoke about his days in the military quite fondly, without grief, pausing every now and then to look at the sky behind us.
“I would go again today, if they called me. Now, what could I do? Maybe sweep,” he remarked.
“I’d go again in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat.”
His service in the military made him feel a connection to the American Legion. The help that organizations like these provide to veterans like himself, his late brother, and his friends, were a reflection of what he lived to do: to serve for others.
“I just thought it would be, not a duty, but it would be an honor to do this, give people the right to vote.”
Another poll worker exited the building and walked over to us.
“Are you a reporter for someone?” She asked.
The man sitting beside me interjected before I could say anything back. “No, he’s writing my biography.”
I was glad that he did. Tension that remains unbroken can carry harsh punishments for something so simple as an innocent misunderstanding. With it gone, she nervously laughed and commented on the heat, which we all agreed that we enjoyed.
“I just wanted to check, we’re not allowed to have any reporters around here.”
I asked them both why. Both of them hesitated to say what seemed like what was on the tip of their tongue, but we were eventually given a more formal answer by our guest.
“Be… cause they sometimes cause problems.”
The tension had come back. The words weren’t heavy, but we all stayed silent for a moment like we were watching them fall out of the air and waiting to hear them hit the ground.
Once again, Mr. Corleone kicked the TV.
“I just seen two guys from my church here, they voting?”
After some more small talk, the woman walked away to ask someone else about the weather and got even less out of them. It was nothing, but it still felt like an escape.
“I figured she’d be out here sooner or later to check on ya.”
He continued with one last story about how the military once saved him from being a citizen, one vastly perpendicular to his first tale of a dangerously close brush with the war that would eventually take his brother’s health, and life. It was a simple story from a short time that he spent at home from the Reserve. Looking for work, he was advised to talk to a friend of his mother’s, and was soon tasked to take a sealed envelope to the Capitol Building in Rhode Island. It was easy enough to follow the man’s instructions, which verbatim were “don’t open the fucking envelope,” and he eventually was assigned a profitable vending machine route for whom he found out three weeks later was the New England boss. This worried . Since his mother’s friend had done him a favor by giving him a job, he said, they were going to want a favor in return. He decided to open a business with the help of a friend, a print shop, so that he wouldn’t have to ask for any more jobs of the local mafia, but it wasn’t long before they found him again. The same man that gave him his first job entered his shop and told him to counterfeit football pool tickets. It was good money, and he was a good friend of the family, but the more he did this, he said, the more he would owe him. He was becoming paranoid, worried that he would never find a way out, but it was at this time that the military called him back to Fort Bennet. He had escaped, and was such a pleasant surprise that it still made him smile, as if he just found out.
“I was so glad. I was so glad. I didn’t take any more stupid jobs after that anymore.”
He had been a poll worker for eight or nine years, and he said that this year was his last.
“I was watching you close over there. I didn’t know what you was doing and said to myself well, I gotta check, make sure my gun was lowered.”
—–
As I left, the man waved at me and walked back to his truck, its back window half-covered in Trump stickers. I felt a feeling of great change from the experience, similar to what one would feel if they could sense the the earth moving beneath their feet. Another generation of Americans, still in their old ways, were finally beginning to make peace with the slow cycles of this great magnet. They’ve lived their lives, satisfied enough that they feel less and less obligated to demand much more of this world for themselves, only to make it a better place for others.
I always forget that old men like him were once young men like me, and that not every clash between our generations must always be political. I voted the way I did, he his own, and though I may see him objectively as part of that agentic 63%, it was the first time that I didn’t care very much.
For his daughter, whom he wanted to read this.
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