When I was in high school, I had to complete a public service project for one of my classes. I chose to take a Saturday morning and go to Fulton Avenue in Brooklyn, and try to get people to register to vote. It sounded easy enough. And it wasn’t physically demanding or in a particularly tough area — I thought I’d go shopping afterwards. It also left me with an experience I’ve never forgotten.
As expected when you approach strangers on the street, I got ignored a lot. Some people were happy to register. One woman almost cried because she wanted to register to vote, but never knew how. About a third of the people said something like this: “Girl, please! Why waste your time voting? It doesn’t make a difference.” I was 17, so I argued right back with them: “Then don’t complain about your government!”
Seriously, that group of people — all of them black people — really pissed me off at first. And then the experience just stayed in the back of my brain. After I saw “Selma,” they came back to me. Of course I knew what happened 50 years ago on March 7 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And here’s hoping all of us will take the 10-15 minutes to read President Obama’s speech about what happened that day, and what has happened since.
Here’s one thing that’s happened since: People, black and otherwise, still sit on their very powerful hands on Election Day, even if they are registered to vote. This happened, although others literally died and took a boot to their face so that everyone could have a say in how our system works. And what do we do to repay that debt? And it is a debt — and let’s just think about this for a second. Fifty or so years ago, a white woman, Viola Luizzo, driving protesters home was killed because she wanted to help. It’s an impact on a movement, but it’s an impact on a family. Someone lost a wife and a mother for the idea that someone else should have what this woman had — something she just got herself! The fabric of a family was torn because of this idea she had about equality everywhere.
But we need to be reminded that it’s Election Day, when it’s the same effin’ spot on the calendar every year. I cried during the scene on the Pettus bridge in Selma because of this mostly. It’s the idea that John Lewis got his ass kicked for black people, and the only time they can find their way to a voting station is when a black person is on the ballot.
“My voice doesn’t matter,” you, you person who refuses to vote and actually brags about it to your family and coworkers, say? “The system doesn’t work anyway? My vote doesn’t make a difference?” Well, there is a point nestled in there somewhere. Our government is imperfect. The idea that lobbyists even exists shows that our system is flawed. We have lawmakers fighting a healthcare system that has been found to be largely beneficial to many of the people they “represent.” Yet these things persists. You know why, right?
Because we think our voices don’t matter. But if Bloody Sunday taught us anything, it would have been that if enough of us talk, people have to listen. That would have been the lesson if we had been listening. But hell, who has time to vote?