Gift Cards or Nothing: an Election Day tale by Pamela Francis
My 13-yr old recently told me who to vote for. I know it’s “for whom to vote”, but as I intimated in last Wednesday’s blogpost, it’s open season on grammar and usage in the English language, so… dangling participle it is.
In any event, he told me that his friend’s grandparents had told him that we should all vote for Ben Carson. And since they are affluent, stable, churchgoing types who also own their own family business and show my son a really good time whenever he’s around them, they’ve got HIS vote. As for me, I haven’t formed my opinions yet on the candidates on either side really, and since there is no one running this time that I can unabashedly say I voted for because they were Black and fine, and that I’d vote for them again and again even if the country went to hell in a Coach bag, I’ll have to do some homework.
Luckily or un, the campaign circus has started so far in advance I almost thought election day was going to be THIS year. Not to mention I spent a few days this past summer doing voter registration duty and really trying to get people pumped for the ballots as though we’d be voting for our new president this month. But we’re not quite there yet, so in honor of the elections or what will soon enough be… here is an account of my summer stint registering people to vote:
“GIFT CARDS OR NOTHING”
At three-thirty pm on a Friday afternoon at Atlantic Station, patrons milled about and made their way towards the much hyped BBQ festival scheduled to begin at four. My teammate and I wiped the sweat from our brows and gripped our clipboards determinedly as we prepared for what could easily turn out to be five hours in the Atlanta heat, trying in vain to get African American and Hispanic residents to register to vote. Contrary to one grass roots organization’s belief, registering the historically underserved is not “a numbers game”, it’s a clarion call to hope. Seventy percent of African American males surveyed by a non-partisan voter registration canvasser trolling the rural-urban enclaves of Atlanta, GA said they didn’t believe in voting. “Nothing changes,” they affirmed. They would rather come to political power “by any means necessary,” touted one resistant, but not through the futile exercise – in their observation – of voting in an American election.
How can you convince the unfooled of the unlikely? Not by risking arrest and an overnight incarceration stint because you’re standing on private-public property trying to flag down and “harass” scads of commuters on their way to catch a bus into giving up their state identification numbers, addresses and in some cases last four digits of their socials in exchange for “the privilege” of casting a ballot in a pointless endeavor. No. If political organizations want to register “five thousand African American and Latino voters” inside of sixty days, in time for a midterm election considered by most (incorrectly or not) to be wholly inconsequential, they’d better invest in… “gift cards”, as one adamant and proud non-registrant demanded if he was to put pen to our voter registration card. Gift cards or nothing. Because in a society where NOT the citizen’s vote, but rather the ten-thousand-dollar dinner plate purchased at the lobbyist’s fundraiser talks, so does ten dollars to spend on the size six, twenty-one pack of “pullups” at Target.
Tags: #Ben Carson, #election day, #gift cards, #Presidential elections 2016, #southern voters, #Target gift cards, #the campaigns, #voting
