Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003 So the polls open at 7:00 a.m. I was there ten minutes early. Incredibly, there was a couple in front of me, who I thought, of course, were poll workers, but were a couple who'd moved to the Excelsior from San Jose. At two minutes to seven, a woman comes up behind us. "Aren't they open yet?" "No, not yet." "Well, this is crazy." At exactly seven, she walks by all of us, peeks her head in the door of the school library where we're voting (one of those redwood embossed trailers public schools are so fond of) and yells in, "Hey, come on! Open the damn polls! Some of us have to get to work!" Then she walks back behind me and slams her body three times into the trailer, like someone kicking a car that won't stop. What I is to say, in a calm, rational voice, "Hey, come on. These are volunteers here, and you've got an extra hour to get to work," and I want to say this while holding the woman upside down and kicking her. And this is why I end up saying nothing--because if I say something and she doesn't back down, I will try to kill her. So I don't say anything. A woman poked her head out and apologized--they were all first-time poll workers and they were having a problem and had called a supervisor in. Then they let us in to vote. The woman who slammed the trailer was voter number one, and got to initialize the voting machine roll to show there had been no previously entered votes. Four hours later, I'm still angry and ashamed. I keep trying to slice it a thousand different ways but it still seems lousy. Is that sort of entitlement the result of our crappy drive-thru culture? And how ironic that voter number one was the last person to show up, and the biggest jerk to boot. It's like watching bad juju cast on democracy right before my very eyes. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:03 AM | |
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