Long Live the Republic

It’s Monday, the day before Election Day 2022. I got out the vote early today, and by early, I mean 3:30am when I got up to go to work.

I have held many jobs in my life, but the industry I have spent the most time in is the installation of commercial office furnishings. I have installed cubicles from Denver, Colorado to Naples, Italy and many points in between. The trade has taken me into mom and pop shops, ultra-secure military posts, factories, call centers, and operating rooms. But today is the first time I had the privilege of delivering voting booth set ups. And it warmed my heart.

Conspiracy theories are seductive because they give simplified answers to the complex reasons why unexpected and unwanted outcomes happen. There are those who believe the previous election was swerved through massive corruption and data manipulation, others who state that systemic problems with the process work malignantly to deny the vote to minorities. Caustic mistrust plagues the system.

The people I encountered today served as a vaccine against the pandemic of demagoguery blaring through the broadcast waves and posted through anti-social media. Retired school principles who set up voting machines and locked them away in their delivery cages, custodians and volunteers who received their booths, teachers, parents, your neighbors. In short, the extraordinary ordinary people of We the People working to provide the principle means of our self-government.

Tomorrow, all across this great nation, we citizens will participate in our blood-bought privilege to make our wishes known in the voting booth. It is an act of faith in the structure of our republic and a process shepherded at the grass roots. May we never lose the wonder of it. Long live the Republic!