Election day -- the enshrining moment of democracy

“Light tomorrow with today.”

-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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I’m a tomorrow kind of guy, always looking backward and forward at the same time, trying to get what I can from history and anticipating what’s going to happen when the clock ticks ahead.

I try to see beyond the clouds or over the hill or through the sun’s glare to what a new day will bring.

A day like tomorrow, for instance.

For the first time in months that seem like years, the political rhetoric -- the lies and whispers -- will be toned down and we’ll be given an opportunity to have a say in what the days after tomorrow will bring.

We’ll vote.

I take that opportunity very seriously. I haven’t missed voting in any kind of election since I cast my first ballot in 1952. It was for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower. I didn’t dislike Ike, but Stevenson was my kind of guy.

Time proved that old Adlai was just too professorial for the American people. Too smart. Too poetic. When his political career was over, he was asked about his future. He said, “All I want to do is sit under a tree with a glass of wine and watch the dancers.” That’s not bad. Not bad at all.

I almost voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. I considered him a man of honor, but the war in Vietnam was raging and he was the worst kind of hawk.

As it turned out, so was LBJ, who managed to escalate a small war into a large war, and twiddled his thumbs in bewilderment over its results.

I’m not all that liberal, but I’ll be glad to see the exit of George W. Bush. He isn’t the only one, I grant you, who has left a mixed legacy for us to ponder. We moved from the grace and idealism of John F. Kennedy to LBJ to the disgrace of Richard Nixon. Elected in a landslide, he became the only person in the history of the presidency to resign. We watched him go without shedding a tear.

Randy Bill Clinton couldn’t keep his fly zippered. We wanted to look away in embarrassment as he attempted to redefine sex by explaining exactly what he was doing with Monica Lewinsky.

The episode darkened the glow of the Oval Office and shattered the legacy he could have left.

If nothing else, the history of flawed presidencies proves that personal failures can undo borderline greatness; power enhances human weaknesses and leaves us pondering the choices we make.

What matters tomorrow and the days after that is the right and privilege of a free people to cast ballots for whomever we please without guns at our heads or the agents of intimidation waiting outside.

Fools and fakers are often as intriguing as scholars.

Tomorrow.

I’m going to stride right up to the polling place, register my presence and enclose myself in the voting booth as though I were wrapped in a flag.

It will be the kind of enshrining moment that always brings more of a lump in my throat than the national anthem at a football game. I don’t need marching bands or the amplified voice of a pop diva telling me it’s still the land of the free.

I know it is, and tomorrow I will celebrate that freedom.

By the simple act of punching out the names of political candidates I will acknowledge all that is good about the country that I have gone to war for without seeking either exemption or asylum; a country that has allowed me to loudly disagree, to shake my fist at the misanthropes among us and to march in the streets to protest what’s going wrong.

I will have all of my decisions with me in my voting guide. Each choice is clearly marked. I could be out of the booth in less than a minute.

But I don’t rush. I pause to take pride in the achievement of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the others who gave me this right.

Tomorrow.

It will be a day of glory. I will tell the future what I expect beyond the voting booth, beyond the cheers and the tears, beyond the divisive rhetoric of yesterday’s demagogues, and into the new mornings of tomorrow’s decision makers.

And even when I’m no longer in a position to chronicle America’s progress, others will. And they’ll be watching far beyond the day after tomorrow.

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almtz13@aol.com