Election Day in the 11th Congressional District • August 3, 2021
I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom. As I age, I find that to be a recurring and necessary attitude.
In America today, every election seems like the most important one in my lifetime. I’m more aware now than I was in 1964 that some of my fellow citizens don’t want people whose skin is like mine to have voting rights. A good number of them sit in the Ohio legislature and work ceaselessly to make it more difficult for many of my neighbors to vote, especially those who may be older, more tired, less privileged by life.
I will vote today because I will not concede to those legislators who talk trash about voter fraud while setting my state’s elections regime to discriminate against urban voters in the allocation of drop boxes.
These people are the craven spiritual descendants of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, Lester Maddox, James Eastland, the Ku Klux Klan, and White Citizens Councils.
Legislators who talk trash about voter fraud while setting state elections regimes to discriminate are craven spiritual descendants of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats.
They wear masks of civic normality and business as usual while conspiring in both closed and open sessions to restrict the franchise of their fellow citizens.
And that is normal in America. There have always been people in power who worked to withhold voting rights from others in these United States, whether those others were women, freedmen, black people, Hispanics, or otherwise considered deficient by status. The nation was founded on that exclusionary principle.
Not in order to form a more perfect Union, but to deter its arrival.
I vote today out of respect for and in the spirit of Bob Moses, a true American patriot who died just over two weeks ago. Moses grew up in public housing, went on to gain a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and earn many other honors for his life of service. He was teaching math in a private school in his mid-twenties in New York City when he quit to go help people he did not know. Huge numbers of black people in the mid-twentieth century were living in a feudal state in Mississippi and across the South.
At great and constant peril to his life, Moses worked to register poor black sharecroppers and others who had been denied the right to register and vote because legislators and others could get away with it.
I vote today because I heard Otis Moss Jr. speak one cold dismal night in a nearly empty church in Hough. He told the story of how one Election Day his father walked over twenty miles in rural Georgia to vote as a sixty-something for the first time. Setting out early in the day, he walked eight miles or so, only to be told he had to vote somewhere else. He then walked a near equal distance to a second polling location, only to be given the same runaround. He was then pointed to an equally distant third polling place. Still undeterred, he walked another several hours to the designated location. Upon arrival, he was told the polls had closed; it was too late to vote.
Otis Moss Jr. ‘s father never got to vote. He died before the next election.
I’m voting today to tell those around the country who solicited, raised and bundled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from around the country — including money from out of the region Republicans like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and other corporatists seeking to influence a Democratic primary who know little about our issues and care less about our community — that I reject their negativity and misinformation. I want them and others to know that I will not support candidates who have not proved they care about my community or are unprepared to represent it.
And finally, I vote today because I know that even friendly politicians who actively seek my vote won’t respect me or my community if I can’t be bothered to go to the polls.
As an American citizen, voting is both my birthright and my duty.
Regardless of your preference in party or candidate in today’s election, I hope you feel the same compulsion to vote, that you act on it, and that you forward the link to this article to your fellow 11th District Patriots as an inoculation against a virus more deadly than COVID-19: the SAD virus of surrender, apathy and despair.
The polls close at 7:30pm.
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Updated at 5pm
