It's never to early to start teaching the basics of Representative DemocracyI. Love. To. Vote.
Voting is my favorite thing to do with my clothes on. Hands down and bar none. My absolute favorite thing. I would do it every day if I had the chance.
There might be a Democracy gene, because Zoe likes it too. Election day is a big deal. We always took our kids to vote, and now we take her. It's a ritual. We take the "Big old max Bus" (that is what Zoe calls all of the buses because she's two, and the most zealous public transportation fan in Kansas City) to the polling place, where we sign in and collect our ballots and go to one of the tables to vote. Zoe helps. Then she feeds our ballots into the optical scan machine and she gets an "I Voted" sticker, too. (It is upside down and lost in the glare at about 11 o'clock from her belly button.)
From the moment I got home from school this afternoon, she was ready to go vote! By the time I was ready to tackle Tuesday in Beta, she was chomping at the bit in anticipation of doing our civic duty.
Now I am not pretending she knows the first thing about it - but she is learning her life habits now, and she could develop a lot worse habits than a fetish for democratic participation. The fact that she cares (and I know this is due to the fact that she is being reared in an environment where where the adults care, where politics are present, discussed and understood) and that puts her miles ahead of a lot of adults out there who can't be bothered to vote. Case in point: At my heavily populated Midtown polling place, when I voted at 4:00 p.m., my ballot was number 254 scanned into the machine today, and the polls opened at 6:00 a.m.
The hottest mayoral contest in 75 years, twelve candidates vying for two spots on the ballot in April, and that's the turnout?
Fine. I have no problem making decisions on your behalf, since I am thoroughly convinced that I know best anyway.
There might be a Democracy gene, because Zoe likes it too. Election day is a big deal. We always took our kids to vote, and now we take her. It's a ritual. We take the "Big old max Bus" (that is what Zoe calls all of the buses because she's two, and the most zealous public transportation fan in Kansas City) to the polling place, where we sign in and collect our ballots and go to one of the tables to vote. Zoe helps. Then she feeds our ballots into the optical scan machine and she gets an "I Voted" sticker, too. (It is upside down and lost in the glare at about 11 o'clock from her belly button.)
From the moment I got home from school this afternoon, she was ready to go vote! By the time I was ready to tackle Tuesday in Beta, she was chomping at the bit in anticipation of doing our civic duty.
Now I am not pretending she knows the first thing about it - but she is learning her life habits now, and she could develop a lot worse habits than a fetish for democratic participation. The fact that she cares (and I know this is due to the fact that she is being reared in an environment where where the adults care, where politics are present, discussed and understood) and that puts her miles ahead of a lot of adults out there who can't be bothered to vote. Case in point: At my heavily populated Midtown polling place, when I voted at 4:00 p.m., my ballot was number 254 scanned into the machine today, and the polls opened at 6:00 a.m.
The hottest mayoral contest in 75 years, twelve candidates vying for two spots on the ballot in April, and that's the turnout?
Fine. I have no problem making decisions on your behalf, since I am thoroughly convinced that I know best anyway.
