a fifty-something under-tall half-deaf school librarian in the jersey suburbs with two grown kids and time on her hands

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

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2006-11-02

08:37

It's about 7:45, and I'm at school. So far, not a great day. For one, it's raining, and I figure that's got to be death to someone walking on crutches. I was very nervous with every step out there. K is not a morning person, as in, no one who lives with her should ever have to see her or talk to her or deal with her in the morning. But of course, I had to today, and since I'm already very annoyed by this having to ask everyone to do things for me, other people being annoyed by it does not enhance my mood. Also, my cup of coffee spilled over when one of the crutches slipped and knocked into it, so I'm at work with no coffee in my system. The velour warmup suits -- yes, you read that right -- that K bought for me at her store yesterday so that I would have clothes to wear are too long in the pants, and I was too tired last night to try to hem them, so I'm back in what I wore Tuesday, but fortunately R did a load of laundry for me last night so at least it's clean. What more can I tell you?

I was prompted to start writing so early because of a comment that bluesleepy left me, in which she said that where she lives -- Oregon, I believe -- all voting is done by mail. I am simply horrified by this. Their elections are at the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service? What's wrong with this picture? Have you ever mailed something that never arrived and you go to the post office to check on it and they shrug, as if to say, well, it's a crapshoot, some stuff gets delivered and some stuff doesn't. ????? Then they ask if you insured it. Are people supposed to insure their ballots? It's not like it has monetary value. You just want it to get there. And you have to pay to vote? I am disgusted and appalled.

New Jersey is so densely populated that everybody is within range of a polling place. Here in Bizarro Town, there are polling places in every school -- that's six elementary, two middle, one high -- and in several of the fire stations as well. Most polling places actually have two or more separate voting areas inside because each place serves more than one voting district. There's an elementary school down the street from my house, maybe six or eight houses away, but I don't vote there, I vote at the middle school right next to it. That's where my voting district is.

We vote on electronic machines, and have for years. I have never voted on a paper ballot in my life; before the electronic machines we had mechanical machines, where you pull the lever next to the name of the candidate you want to vote for. There was always a little sample mechanical machine outside the voting booth to teach you how to use it; I remember playing with the sample machine on election day in 1960 while my father was in the booth voting for Kennedy. So no, never a paper ballot in this part of New Jersey in my memory.

When the county went to the electronic machines maybe ten or twelve years ago, someone here at school got the clever idea of asking them to donate two of the old lever-based machines to us, which we then used for several years for student government elections so as to give the kids a greater sense of realism when voting. Someone from the county would come and set them up for us ahead of time, but we had the key to open them up afterwards and get the totals, which I sometimes helped with. It was very cool. Inside the machine were great big rolls of punched paper tape on which the votes had been recorded. The now elusive paper trail.

How hard would this be: as we cast our votes on an electronic machine and press the button that records them, why can't it just print out a little paper receipt that the voter tears off, looks over for accuracy, and then deposits in a box outside the voting booth? Or in the voting booth, for that matter. The same way the ATM prints receipts after a transaction. For god's sake, I print out a paper receipt after someone borrows a library book; we have the technology.

K -- that would be the kid I'm annoyed with this morning -- has never voted in person before, and is excited to be doing so. She's only voted by absentee ballot so far, since she's always been away at school this time of the year. Even so, she has one voting experience way cooler than most people, since two years ago at this time she was in Berlin for the semester and our very clever county government did not mail absentee ballots out in time for people overseas (and presumably servicemen and women overseas, which I think is really reprehensible). She and another girl, who also didn't get her ballot, had to go to the American consulate in Berlin, where they somehow looked up the ballot for the locations each girl was voting from, and so they cast their absentee ballots there, at the consulate. Many of the other students in her Berlin group, I believe, did not bother to request absentee ballots at all, and didn't go to the consulate, because they didn't care if they voted or not.

I understand that in Australia, for example, it is against the law not to vote. I am all for that, although I can only wonder what sort of results we would get here since the population of this country are, for the most part, dunces. What John Kerry said the other day, although it came out totally wrong, was not far off the mark. In this country, when you don't do your homework and you get out of fulfilling your responsiblities, you get to be president and start a war. (No way Kerry would have dissed actual service men and women. Remember, he's one of them and he knows what it's like from the inside. It's Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld who all managed to save their rich little asses and get out of service during Viet Nam. They still think that a soldier's life is like a John Wayne movie. Kerry's the one who knows better. He just talks stupid sometimes.)

As long as I am on the subject of politics and the war, I would just like to ask if anyone out there thinks that the current administration actually does "support our troops." It is this president and Congress who sent them there, for one, and who allocate funds to them. It is they who determine how long these men and women will serve, and whether or not a committment to the National Guard has suddenly come to mean that you can't support your family and may lose your home and no one knows when you are ever coming back. What makes me the most angry is that it is these people -- not the party that isn't in power -- who have sent our troops over there without the proper supplies and equipment. This makes me want to scream. If the appropriate military gear at this point in time is a certain kind of body armor, how can we possibly justify sending our sons and daughters (and grandmothers,for that matter; there's a grandmother from Bizarro Town in the National Guard who's over there now) into danger without it? Aside from any actual policy over there, this war is simply being mismanaged. My guess is that Haliburton is getting all the money, but that's just me.

This is just what I needed, a good rant. Maybe I'll rant more later, but I'm going to try to post by email now, and then first period will be over and I can hobble down to the bunker-like faculty room (where no one gets cell-phone reception, btw, because the walls are too thick and there are no windows) and finally get a cup of coffee.

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I'm watching listening to The Pledge of Allegiance
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