I’m the enemy within.
So are you.
I was standing with you as the voting lines curled around the corner of the building and down the block.
I listened when you chatted about your kid’s football team, the artwork she entered to a school contest, the flowers still blooming in the yard and how you try to fend off the rabbits and deer from eating the last of the spring’s new planting.
We smiled as the new voters clutched the instruction papers and exchanged their excitement to be standing right there, in that line, taking part.
Someone remembered their first time, in a line, at a school, a city hall, paper ballots, marked and folded, a nodding thanks, and taking a chocolate chip cookie.
I remember sitting on the hard, dark booth in the voting room at the Balsams Resort in Dixville Notch, N.H, where all the voters gather at midnight on election day to cast their ballots when their name is called, right there, among friends.
For all the world to see.
The weight of that room lands on your shoulders in the silence of a July afternoon visit; the important weight of it all.
It’s always been fraught, this voting, always been fraught to choose.
It brought us war, and sometimes the end to war.
It brings us different times; in some form it always brings us the future.
Some leaders don’t want you to vote because it bring change.
Some leaders don’t want you to vote because it exposes the empty staleness of their ideas.
Others want you to be part of the change, to lead the change.
But standing in that line is the change.
No vote is the same.
Someone, somewhere wants you to stay home, to be silent.
But that day, in that line, you spoke.
But the fact you were there makes you one of the enemies within, because that simple act pricks a hole in their conflated notion of what they believe and would act on as winner; that simple act says, Wait a minute buddy, listen up.
Vote because your life depends on it.
Vote because the lives of your kids and grandkids depend on it.
Vote as if there is no choice.
Because if you don’t, there might not be another choice.
I vote because I want to see the light in your eyes, to feel your glowing smile and to raise our hands in victory.
I vote because I am the enemy within.
And so are you.
