I have here in my hot little hands, one gin-you-wine, cer-tee-friable, 100% pure, finest grade Colombian absentee ballot.

are you jealous?

also – debate number 3 is tonight.

if you think none of this matters, here’s an email I received recently:

> > > > The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of “obstructing sidewalk traffic.”

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell
bars above her head and left her hanging for the night,
bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis
into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and
knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu,
thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing,
dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and
kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the “Night of Terror” on Nov. 15,
1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in
Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the
suffragists imprisoned there because they dared
to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the
right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open
pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested
with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul,
embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair,
forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her
until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this
year because–why, exactly? We have carpool duties?
We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter?
It’s raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening
of HBO’s new movie “Iron Jawed Angels.” It is a
graphic depiction of the battle these women waged
so that I could pull the curtain at the polling
booth and have my say.

I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still
my passion. But the actual act of voting had become
less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often
felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes
it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s
history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by
my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was–with
herself. “One thought kept coming back to me as I
watched that movie,” she said. “What would those women
think of the way I use–or don’t use–my right to vote?
All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women,
but those of us who did seek to learn.” The right to vote,
she said, had become valuable to her “all over again.”

I wish all history, social studies and
government teachers would include the movie in their
curriculum… we are not voting in the numbers that we should be,
and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try
to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that
she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring
to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said,
and brave. That didn’t make her crazy. The doctor admonished
the men: “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”
> > > >

woman, man, black, latino… whoever you are, and whatever group you belong to, *someone fought courageously on your behalf for the right to vote*

don’t let it be in vain.

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