By Terry
Last week, as part of our citizenship badge, I read my Brownies a story about Susan B. Anthony. I explained to them that until only 84 years ago (84 years! Fewer than my grandmother has been alive!), women weren't permitted to keep their earnings, own property, or vote in this country, ostensibly the most free on the planet.
I encouraged the girls, as I encourage you, to really think about what that means, to contemplate how powerless we once were, and the power that we now wield with our votes.
Then, on Tuesday morning, a man came to my house to do some work. When he was leaving, I said, "Go vote!" in exactly the same way that I would have said "Have a nice day!" if it hadn't been November 2. He smiled, shrugged, and told me that he had never voted in his life.
To me, that's unimaginable. It's like saying "I feel like I have no power over my own life, so I don't care one bit about what happens to me or my kids. I'm just a stick in the stream, riding where the current takes me."
Here at my house, that is just not the way things work. Not only do we vote, we take our kids to vote, we talk to them about who we're voting for and why, and we teach them that voting is not only a right, but a responsibility.
With all of that in mind, I took Emily with me to our polling place. I gave her a minute to check out the practice voting booth in the front hall. I bought her a muffin from the PTO bake sale. I took her picture, and pictures of her little second-grade friends. I picked her up so she could push the levers with her own little fingers.
In other words, I made the experience into the very big deal that it is and, hopefully, watered a seed that will grow into a lifelong voter.
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