as i rode my bike to the school which serves as my local polling place, i thought about how cool it was to be voting in the land of susan b. anthony herself. i imagined wearing bloomers and people giving me dirty looks as i rode. i suppose people back then saw women voting similarly to how people now see same-sex marriage. i wonder if the people i know who do not support same-sex marriage would have not supported women's suffrage. it seems like we do better as a country when we are expanding people's civic and civil rights rather than limiting them.
(and btw, how many more evangelical leaders have to suffer before we will finally realize that the more inflated your sense of righteousness, and the more you base public decision-making on that righteousness, the more of a pressure cooker you make in your poor little brain, and the higher the stakes are when it turns out that you are only human after all? save an evangelical and work toward a non-repressive society!)
riding my bike down tree-lined streets with the leaves on the ground on a nice fall day, to vote in a grade school with lots of different races in attendance, i also felt transported back to my childhood, watching PBS in the 1970s. PBS in the 1970s taught that it's really fun and interesting to live around people who don't look like you, and that those differences are something to seek out and learn from, rather than whisper about as you pass people's houses. PBS in the 1970s also taught that you should be kind, and that you should do stuff and make stuff and ask about stuff.
sorry for the utopian sentimentality, but it was all right there in front of me, people, complete with the giant gray machine voting station that did not even need electricity (so my bloomers wouldn't get caught in any wires), plus on the sticker i got that said "i voted today," someone had hand-written between the lines, "Have a Great Day!" i was living some kind of dream there for about 5 minutes.
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5 comments:
Thank you for the lovely post. I've added you to my blogroll as well (let me know if you don't want that dubious "honor").
Chancing across your comments on PBS as the voice of tolerance and democracy, I am reminded of comments of another Critic I stumbled upon. His name, I believe, was Chappelle, and he saw in public broadcasting a command to judgment (Oscar is a grouch!) as well as market reward (…and that’s why he lives in a trashcan!). Your post reminds me of the generative power of reading. And on this election day, it too vote for hope.
That's a very sweet post. I lived right around where you live when I was a kid, and pbs was channel 21. The real channels were 8, 10, and 13, which broadcast shows that taught us that feathered hair could fight crime and that blended families could not survive without a goofy maid named Alice. Later I got cable and learned that love is a battlefield.
PBS, I'm sorry to say, just freaked me out. I did not want to watch people make things out of milk cartons and an old potato. Did they do that on Fantasy Island? No. They did not. I did not want to listen to Big Bird teach me a valuable lesson. Perhaps if he had been a teen-aged runaway, or had had a part time job on The Love Boat I could have gotten into him a little. Right now I could be writing things like: remember that time that Gopher almost roasted Big Bird? Ha ha!
I like to vote, and I like to ride my bike, and I like dogs. I'm with you all the way. But my feeling about what PBS really taught us: good production values are nothing to sneeze at. Snuh Eeeze . Sneeze.
Maybe I'm your new zany sidekick. Like a virtual Rhoda.
DM: thanks! and i love winning contests, as well as attention in any form, so you bore glad tidings indeed~
RB: i am familiar with chapelle's criticisms, and ultimately i will always side with Comedy.
MMS: while it's true i am auditioning sidekicks, i think i need someone more , shall we say, *early* modern?
moreover, i share with you the attraction for the slick. after all, josh holloway is i think my favorite person on TV. but SOME of us weren't ALLOWED to watch anything BUT PBS, because their parents had the best intentions and a fetish for education. thanks for rubbing it in. little did they know what values they were instilling me with, just as they started to settle into their impenetrable beige fortress.
The best part is that you got to vote in the city where Susan B. was famously arrested for voting! The first time I visited the Anthony house in Rochester I got chills when I realized I was standing in the very room where it happened.
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