Get Out the Vote

My political opinions are none of your business. I plan to keep it that way despite the sore temptation to jump headlong into the noisy fray surrounding this year’s presidential election. It’s not that I don’t have strong political convictions or deep concern for what this nation might look like as a result of a win by either side. I do.

I also recognize that the will of the American people, as expressed through the ballot box, is a bedrock concept of our nation and our political system. Which is about as good as it gets compared to any other available option in the elected political leadership arena. Say what you want about all that, accuse, blather, and conduct a public pee-pee dance if things don’t go as you think they should, but in the end the American people will have spoken. And despite some unsettling indications that many have lost faith in America, I still believe in the American people and the American spirit. Those good folks don’t need more goosing and cajoling from me. There’s plenty of that going on nonstop, ad nauseum right now to the extent that Joe or Jane Sixpack barely has time to pop a top and think it all over in a moment of quiet contemplation.

As is often my case, I was a late bloomer in the American political garden. Many of my formative years were in military service. I had a lot of more pressing issues at hand like avoiding crap details and saving enough from my meager paydays to buy beer. That last concern was a big one as I had not yet turned the magic corner at 21 making it legal for me to buy a beer at the Enlisted Men’s Club. We had an elderly, twice-busted PFC that would take care of that for a modest fee. Becoming old enough to vote was a remote and unpondered concern. In fact, I was unaware that military people could vote until I was shoehorned into some lecture by the unit’s collateral duty Voting Officer, a clueless Second Lieutenant who had obviously done something to upset the CO.

Before we even had a chance to get comfortable at the base theater, he ordered everyone under the age of 21 to leave and report to the Gunny for employment in policing the area. That cleared about three-quarters of the room, so I didn’t have a chance to hear the lieutenant’s brilliant discourse on a citizen’s responsibility and the mechanics of it all including registering in one’s home of record and applying for an absentee ballot. That came later when I reached the magic milestone of adulthood on my 21^st birthday. It was all very anticlimactic. There wasn’t much emphasis on voting in Vietnam, but I do recall an underemployed Warrant Officer handing out applications for absentee ballots in some rear area firebase. I took one but I can’t remember ever mailing it.

What chapped my ass at the time was a major Congressional push to lower the voting age to 18 from 21. According to what we could glean from sparse coverage in the Stars & Stripes newspaper, it was an issue that had as much to do with domestic anti-Vietnam uproar over the draft as it did with any sort of age-related political course correction. Those opposed to the selective service system that hoovered up eligible young Americans from age 18 to serve in Vietnam or elsewhere in uniform were stomping around draft-card campfires screaming, “old enough to fight; old enough to vote.”

We were consistently short-handed pragmatists at the time, so few had any kind of complaint about that. The collective opinion in combat units was to give the unruly bastards what they want but be sure and send some over here. In those days we had to take and pass civics classes in high school, so we knew how the system was supposed to work. Somewhere in the back of our distracted minds was the thought that the newly authorized voters back in The World might compose a groundswell at the polls and end the war before it ended us.

It was all moot for those of us in uniform at the time. The 26^th Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted in 1971 lowering the voting age to 18 for American citizens, but the draft didn’t formally end until June 1973. So, win-win in the long run, I guess. It suddenly placed new emphasis on voting and political action for a lot of young Americans whether they were draft-eligible or not. There were new young voices shouting in protest or support of stuff that hardly concerned them before they became eligible to influence matters through popular elections. Much of the vitriol from the anti-war protesters carried over into that, and the nation slowly but surely began to divide along the noisy, strictly partisan lines that we are living with today.

What concerned me as I advanced in service and increasingly got to lead and mentor young men and women, was the lack of civics education in American schools that graduated those folks and sent them out into the world minus a basic understanding of the system they were duty-bound as citizens to influence through the inherent power of their vote. Most were clueless, either intentionally ignorant or unable to discuss politics beyond parroting what they absorbed from highly suspect popular-media sources. True research is tedious and boring. Why do it when all you need to know about major issues can be absorbed in a brief, entertaining manner on Tik-Tok? While I may have a bit of a bully-pulpit among friends and fans who honor me by following what I write, the last thing I want to do is use that medium to add to the white noise engulfing our political system.

It’s all so superficial. Vote for the one who looks cool and never mind his or her agenda. Go for that instant, feel-good gratification. Be sure you’re playing with the Cool Kids, even if those kids are a long-distance trainwreck waiting to happen. We need to get a good, solid, mandatory curriculum of civics back in American classrooms. Our system is in jeopardy and loquacious political pundits of the commentariat won’t save it. They know how to preach but they won’t teach. That’s the responsibility of each and every American. We need to ignore the blather, do our research and vote to influence our nation’s future. We can—and surely should—talk about political issues, but it’s past time to stop shouting and screaming.

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