AoD#6: Family Look on Voting

Art of Democracy

On Monday, my mother, father, and myself gathered around the voter's pamphlet to help my father fill out his absentee ballet. We jibed, and tore apart the facts and commentaries, continuously flaring into disagreement.

But, the most memorable of them was our old friend Chris Brown, running for the utility/water manager. He was up against a man with twenty years of experience and a PhD in marine biology, while Chris himself was a manager of a construction company. Of course, it would be assumed that we would automatically choose the one with a PhD, merely because our water bills have been so low in recent years, ranging from twenty to forty dollars for two months. But, my father rebuttled with the fact that he knows why Chris was running, to stop expansion in our neighborhood, so that he wouldn't pass sewer lines and the like so that the mass development going on in our once heavily wooded neighborhoods could be stopped. At the point, I reluctantly agreed, though my bias against Chris Brown (due to his less than caring relationship with his daughter, whom now lives in Wisconsin with her mom) still told me I should vote for the other man. My father voted for him despite my grumbled complaints, but I saw what he meant in the end.

And, after continuing such a process with the passion relating to insurance measures and levies, my family and I filled out the ballot in a mere three hours, using our political imagination to shape our choices.