I've spent the better part of the last two weeks in some form of modified sleepwear, struggling to shake off an intermittent fever and unbearably sore throat (using a straw halfway down the back of my mouth), with a headache that rendered even my bestest comfort mechanism, Will Shortz daily mental tennis mute. The boxes shimmied and the text was indecipherable, even after the third read through. I rarely bitch about dealing with my health -an autoimmune disease coupled with a surgical botch that quite possibly borders on malpractice that leaves me leaking blood every time I lift a case of soda or a bottle of washing detergent- but dammit, I haven't felt like sitting up, let alone writing.

So I didn't. And to tell you the truth I still don't feel terribly great. But I dragged my soapbox and my blankie over to the desk because what I've been thinking about seems important.

Between my bouts of sleep and duty I listened to an extraordinary man speak of a subject I have been deeply at odds with him about. I'm referring to Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist and the sole reason for my subscription, along with the aforementioned Shortz. Usually this man speaks authoritatively and passionately and this instance was no different, delivered from the Lincoln Library. He was speaking about the Iraqi War, about why he had supported it "52%-49%" as he termed it. He spoke of his experiences and the reasons he could not speak out against ousting Hussein.

I might stop right here and remind you, I was deeply against the war, not because I did not want the humanitarian aid to reach an Arabian populace, rather I was opposed because of the obfuscation and self-evident corporate enrichment by members of the current Administration still ON THE BOOKS as consultants as late as LAST YEAR (2002). I'm referring of course, To Veep Cheney's 180 thousand dollar retainer from Halliburton from his 2002 tax return that crawled across CNN one late evening in the days of 30 inch snowfalls. Yes THAT Halliburton, responsible in part for the crippling West Coast energy shortage and now under investigation for using the cover of American lives lost in the Iraqi peacekeeping mission to gouge the US by inflating gas prices paid by those same troops in the region.
I literally cannot speak anymore when I think of the depraved indifference to the American people's needs: to their judicial and governmental processes, their livelihoods, their standards of living, medical care, social infrastructure, municipal needs... I'm amazed that they can extend that depravity and greed to men and women who are literally dying so they can line their pockets.

So I'll admit to a slight bias that usually tempers Friedman's perspective. All the arguments for the war given at the UN and in televised briefings were bunk if you were paying attention to the facts. I will never, ever trust Colin Powell again and I did not need his aide's tell-all to convince me he was obfuscating the facts. Of COURSE they were! In my mind nothing, NOTHING could justify American lives lost to overthrow one despot in a world of far too many and then paying inflated prices to build and re-build their roads and strengthen their municipal and fire and police forces in Iraq when we are closing schools and laying off police and firemen HERE in America for a supposed lack of funding. The skewing of priorities was so extreme, the basis of discussion so tainted I really choose not to get my blood pressure up this high most days by even discussing it.
Support Bush's invasion force? WHAT?! Not to mention the collateral loss of innocent Iraqi life. So my response to Friedman has been, 'well, noble goals fella, and when we can afford to go after them, we should.'

And then I had to catch his damned speech.

After he hit the usual notes, his tone changed and he made a series of very honest admissions to the audience, the first being his own very tepid support of the Administration's actions in the Middle East. He enumerated nearly all of my own opposition in a kind of shorthand, calling it "the evidence of prior experience" that made 49% of him deeply against the Iraqi action, a position his wife held firmly. He lived in, he said wryly, a mixed marriage.

But then he spoke, in a way more moving than I can recount, about the young people of the region who pleaded with him to keep writing as he did (his column is published in Arabic throughout most of the Middle East and his is a respected voice) and to keep expressing his ideas for them. To keep giving them a voice.

You see, his perspective brought some of them a feeling so foreign they did not recognize it at first until he articulated it for them. The feeling was hope. The feeling was that they had a future, that they could live as a free people.

And Friedman admits openly that he did not report dispassionately and "evenly" on the events leading up to our invovement in Hussein's ouster, he did not even base his support on data or even common sense. In the face of what he knew was the evidence of prior experience, he chose hope. Hope that we would do this thing right, that the sacrifice would be worthy of those who offered it, that those in a position to warp the situation for personal profit would not repeat their actions but instead follow their publicly stated goals and strategies.

In the end, he shrugged and said that it might well be that History would show him a fool. But he convinced this heart that foolish though it might be, the faint hope afforded by this expensive mission -expensive in the worst of possible ways- was the only course of action to contemplate. The status quo, Friedman said, is what brought 9-11 to our doorstep and doing nothing in the region would simply insure more of the same.

I fear that he is right when he says we might find we will suffer more for what we did than if we had not invaded, had not tried to challenge the corruption of individual rights that is rife within the Middle East. Perhaps using our own equally corrupt government will prove our downfall. The only alternative is to allow the cancer of repression to spread and grow larger; already it has charred the landscape of America in very tangible ways, literally and figuratively.

So Mr. Friedman can go to bed tonight knowing that he has one more comrade who understands his position and asks that he keep articulating it: Given a choice between hope and experience, I too, will choose hope. I am lucky enough to have been born into a world where hope is possible and I have not yet forgotten how.


And shifting from the global perspective to the local, I attended last Thursday evening a short governmental training session. Yes, I do have strep throat and yes I had a migraine and yes my fever went through the roof around 2:00 pm the next day. But, you see, I needed to be there; the last training I had cancelled due to my sons' illness, which is inviolate. There is never any good earthly reason to abandon sick children to run off for some governmental affairs seminar. So I rescheduled for last Thursday, at 7:00 pm. and I was faced with a dilemma.

My reasoning is sticky and it doesn't exactly place Westchester county in a benevolent light: my vote in the past primary was thrown out.

I received a very polite letter from the Board of Elections informing me that my vote was disqualified. I called the very nice woman on the phone and asked why, since I had gone to the polls, tried to cast my votes on a machine that was "oops - apparently jammed" in the cheery words of the Poll Worker and then given a punch ballot and envelope to vote with as an alternative, why then did my vote not count?

She very nicely told me that I was a registered voter and that I had cast my ballot in a non-registrant envelope. Somehow this voided out my votes. I not-so-nicely told her that this was my first election in NY, that I had moved since November of 2002 from the West Coast and stupidly obeyed the instructions of the Poll Workers, since there was no other means of self-instruction available to me at the time. She nicely told me that yes, that was a problem for more people than I knew, that I was hardly alone, and that it was simply a matter of not having enough properly educated people to work the polls.

I should stop here (I promise, last digression) and try to explain to you what casting a vote means -- has always meant to me. I'm not speaking from a place of superiority, far from it, Often my own patriotic responses shock and even embarrass me a little bit. I'm hardly a senior citizen, but I find that when the flag passes by, when I see a soldier in uniform, when I sign the registrant's book, I stand taller and I feel a lump in my throat. My peers in those moments seem to be my grandparents' age. When our eyes meet, there is a glimmer of understanding, an unspoken agreement that elevates those times into sacred ones.

It isn't the office you see, or the personalities, or the guns or the pundits or the issues, it is the simple acts of patriotism at its' most basic: the soldier, placing his life before his fellow citizens without question; the flag, emblem of sacrifice and ideal; the act of deciding, the only true task any of us are asked to do really, and are responsible to carry out.

The problems in America are a direct result of that shirking of responsibility that has allowed so many to corrupt the very structure that our Republic rests on. Long before our Vice President moonlighted as a consultant to a multinational corporation a local official did the same thing with impunity. Long before the President or Secretary of State obscured the truth about vital matters of security and budget the city council overstated the crime rate and skewed the numbers on Medicaid. Being a free person requires a little bit of effort -- first to become informed so as to cast a reasoned and informed vote, and second to perform that simple task of making that vote count.

I've driven to the polls with a sprained ankle in a car with standard transmission, using a crutch on the clutch pedal to shift gears. I have cast votes in storms. I have cast votes in rooms filled with Poll Workers excited to have a single voter in the span of four hours and I have stood in line, crying openly in gratitude that so many cared I had to wait nearly an hour for the privilege of filling out my ballot.

I don't take this for granted -- call it a recessive gene, ancestral memory or simply vivid imagination -- I can picture a world where those with no land, those not born male, had absolutely no voice in the direction of the ship of state. I can imagine how tired a soul living in the dawn of the last century -- with wood and oil as sole sources of light and heat, ice for refrigeration, bucket as washer and clothesline as dryer, pump and bucket as faucet, bristle brush for teeth, unpaved roads, destitution level wages. I've always been this way, campaigning in Brownie uniform for a candidate who lost - the first loss of many - to the powers of big money and big corporate interests. Still only able to see the forest, I focused on national races, worked silly, important volunteer jobs --placing flyers; going to rallies, ALONE; knocking on doors on election day to 'get-out-the-vote'. I was born a Democrat, raised in a Republican world and desperate to effect change.

And then I cast my first ballot. It was at a caucus: a place where only the nerds and the wizened remember the wonderful mechanism of the public debate and collective voice! You didn't say "this is my vote, period" and walk away! You stayed there until everyone had a turn and you hashed out your reasoning, you brought clippings and you listened and argued and compromised and it was a satisfying, powerfully satisfying way to cast a vote. I had no knowledge of local elections --who cared?-- but you see, the men and women who came to the primary caucus cared, they cared deeply and for all of the right reasons because they were showing up, ready to be challenged, to explain their choice, to articulate their vision. It was my great good fortune to cast many votes in that way, and to participate in what was the original template for democratic elections.

So when I was told that my vote did not COUNT, after hobbling in with my cane and going through this haphazard devil-may-care this-is-all-fun-and-games ritual (no, hazing) as a NY voter, I was aghast. I asked the very nice lady who was in charge of volunteers. Volunteers? she asked as though I was speaking Farsi, what do you mean volunteers? And I offered to sweep floors, deliver materials, do whatever was needed so that the Poll Workers could focus on allowing people their constitutional right to vote. I had to repeat myself a few times, as there ARE no volunteers anymore at the Polls; freedom, apparently in Westchester County really DOES come at a price of $9 an hour.

They are all paid now, paid to do what makes me want to weep, but I didn't yet know that. And so when they called me back and asked if I would consider becoming an Election Inspector, I said yes. Of course. Yes, yes, yes. And would I be there at 10:00 am on Wednesday? Again, a hundred yesses, though on the day of the training my boys were, as I've said, home from school with sore throats. And so, even though my husband and I agreed that it was stupid to get out of bed and go down to City Hall and spend three hours to do what I thought was my patriotic service (not a paying gig to boot) when he got home from work and I asked if he would please drive me because I really couldn't manage it myself he smiled and told me he had planned on it. I'm pretty predictable to others but a constant surprise to myself.

And that is how, on Thursday evening at 8:55, I was duly sworn in as an Elections Inspector for Westchester County, District 33. And yes, if you're wondering, I did tear up just a little bit. I'd like to think I share something in common with Mr. Friedman. Given a choice between hope and experience, I too, try to choose hope. So far, I haven't yet forgotten how.