Thanks to Obama, I am going to vote for the first time in 10 years

People who know me are often surprised to hear that I haven’t voted since 2000. It’s not something I’m proud of. This is not meant to be an apologia or a defense of myself. It’s meant to demonstrate further just what President Obama has meant to me.

It wasn’t (all) laziness. It was a boycott.

My parents aren’t from the South, but I grew up in Arkansas, where my family fell into the category of “Yellow-dog Democrats” – people who would vote for yellow dog as long as he was a Democrat! My stepdad drives around with a stuffed donkey in his rear window. Like most kids, I shared my parents’ views.

Like everyone my age, I grew up hearing, “Every vote counts!” and learning about all the people who had fought for the right to vote. I grew up with political discussions around the dinner table and the daily newspaper spread all over the house. I loved current events so much I majored in journalism in college. When Bill Clinton ran for President I volunteered at one of his local campaign offices. I was super pro-choice, and in college I was able to help with that cause, too.

I suppressed the sneaking suspicion that my vote wasn’t as valuable as someone’s in Ohio… or Florida… I was part of the system -- with all its flaws.

Then 2000 happened. As someone raised to believe in the system, someone who was so deeply proud of the United States, for all its ups and downs, someone who got into deep political discussions with everyone from my sorority sisters to my cross-country coach, I was crushed by what happened in 2000. I felt deeply betrayed. And very, very angry.

Suddenly “Every Vote Counts!” just sounded naive. How could anyone say it with a straight face? All those votes in Florida didn’t count. They didn’t GET counted. I’m sure some of those people thought of voting as a civic duty and privilege, too. And then the Supreme Court said not to count them.

What I saw was the people in power – the governor of Florida, Supreme Court justices appointed by the “other side” – deciding who was going to be president. They were going to put their guy in the White House no matter what it took. I was so angry that I started avoiding the news; I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t living at home, so I was able to avoid talking politics with my family as well. I started to dodge jury duty. It was a short leap from there to boycotting American elections.

Then I got a job in adult literacy, working in Southeast DC. That didn’t help. It didn’t help because I saw, day after day, how little it mattered who the president was. No matter what was going on in the political stratosphere, high above my head, I was still privileged and my students were still poor. The Metro kept running and I kept going to happy hours. I wasn’t thrilled about the war in Iraq, but I wasn’t angry, either – I was numb. Desensitized to all of it.

Of course I knew it mattered in an abstract, indirect way – my tax dollars, etc. But I came to believe that, regardless of who was in office, regardless of policies set or overturned, the real progress was made in one-on-one interactions between regular people. What mattered to my students were the tiny steps forward they were able to make. That’s what changed their lives.

That’s where I channeled my passion and bitterness and fury. And, sure, voting and keeping up with local politics took work – work that I no longer had to do. The whole thing made me sad. I felt like I was watching this country circle the drain, and I couldn’t do anything about it. So I tried not to think about it.

I have never been one for bandwagons. I take a snobby kind of pride in not liking whatever is “hot” at that moment, whether it’s a TV show or a presidential candidate. I waved at the Obama bandwagon as it passed by; a lot of my friends and family were on it. But I believed that not voting made more of a statement than voting did. And when I heard Obama talk about all the things he was going to do, it reminded me of what every politician said in every campaign.

I remember thinking, You talk a good game, Barack Obama, but do you really think you’re going to be able to do this stuff in 4 years? In 4 years, maybe 10 of my students will get and keep jobs. Things take time. And the partisanship in the Congress was a mess. Iraq was a mess.

Good luck.

And then President Obama slowly but surely proved me wrong. It took a while.

First, there was the stimulus package. Of the many things I saw it do – build new roads in Arkansas and Michigan; create new job training programs for my students; assist friends of mine with their mortgages – my favorite was a “BOGO” deal on AmeriCorps volunteers. My little non-profit could afford to get 2 AmeriCorps volunteers instead of 1, effectively doubling the number of students we were able to serve, even as foundation and private funding dried up.

Then, the Edward M. Kennedy Service Act tripled the number of AmeriCorps positions available in the United States, which I think is brilliant. Under George Bush, AmeriCorps programs were cut. Joining AmeriCorps was the best choice I ever made, and watching the President sign the bill at a ceremony at a Washington, DC, school, made the moment even more powerful.

Perhaps the most significant, for me, has been health-care reform. Simply put, health care reform saved my ass. I was in an impossible situation and completely amazed when the federal government came to my rescue.

That’s what really brought me back to life. The president had done something that made my day-to-day life better. He didn’t have to take on health-care reform first. He could’ve done something else, something that people weren’t scared of. But I guess he knew there were people like me out there who couldn’t wait. I started to watch the news to find out how he did it. I blew up at some LaRoche people with their “Obama-as-Hitler” signs. I went to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

Like a lot of other people, I had become unemployed. I saw the president stand up for me again. He said, If you’re going to extend tax breaks for the wealthy, you have to throw everybody else a bone, too. My extended unemployment benefits have made it possible for me to stay in DC, and I am determined to do everything I can to give back to my city.

And, even though I still have my doubts about the integrity of American elections, I know I owe it to Obama to take 2 hours out of my day and vote for him. It won’t matter much, but it is the right thing to do. It does matter who the President is.

I am part of the system -- with all its flaws. I am a voter, with all my flaws. I’m an American, and that means something to me again.