By Carolyn Schuk

 

"You vote absentee, don't you?" people ask me. When I say no, they look at me as if I just confessed to sneaking out to Garden City with the grocery money. 

 

It isn't old fogy-ism that makes me resist the Registrar of Voters' blandishments – Voting Just Got Easier! It's not even the fact that I like the ritual of going to the poll.

 

The truth is that I like to prolong the opportunity for surprise. For instance, this year I  not only changed my decision on who to vote for at almost the last minute, I also discovered that the trip to poll itself held a  revelation for me.

 

Six months ago I was a solid Hillary Clinton supporter. Then in October, the woman who likes to highlight her foreign policy chops, who promises to lift US foreign policy out of the gutter it currently occupies, this same woman yet again voted aye to enable George Bush to declare Iran's  Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

 

They say  insanity is doing exactly the same thing and expecting different results. The average five year-old is smarter than this.

 

So there I was, two months away from the primary and undecided. Undecided, that is, until I watched – on YouTube -- Barack Obama's Iowa victory speech on January 3.

 

Now it's not just that Obama isn't the hawk Clinton is. (Although his anti-war credentials aren’t entirely clear -- he dodged that Iran vote instead of going on record with a clear 'no' vote.)

 

And it's not just that when he speaks he recalls to me the hopeful 16 year-old I was when I worked on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968.

 

It's those things and more. It's about who Obama is.

 

He's the face of the future – literally and figuratively. He's black and white.  He's immigrant and native-born. His roots are in the developed world and the undeveloped world. His is the face of the future – America's future.

 

His is the face I see in my teenage son and his friends: Cambodian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Russian, Vietnamese, black and white Americans. Some are native-born, some are immigrants. They're every hue of the human rainbow.

 

They're not ideological. They're pragmatic. "Does it work?" is the question they ask. And YouTube is where they go when they want to watch Obama's victory speech, not NBC.

 

But while the world is changing before our baby boomer eyes, we're are still fighting the culture war of 40 years ago – something that's so over for my son's generation. And listening to Obama, it became very clear to me that it was time for the boomers to get off the stage. It's my son's world now.

 

I spent several weeks thinking about all this. Had I voted absentee, I likely wouldn't have cast the same vote I did last week -- for Obama.

 

But that wasn't the only revelation waiting me for me on Election Day.

 

My 16 year-old Youth of the Future son who came with me to the polls asked, "How are you going to vote on the Indian gambling?"

 

After I recovered from the shock of this sudden demonstration of political awareness, I launched into my "A responsible society doesn't fund important things like education by taxing – and in effect encouraging -- other people's vices " talk. But he didn't let me finish.

 

"That's not what it's about, Mom." So I asked him to explain. Which he did very knowledgeably, with facts and figures about which tribes have benefited and which haven't. To him the issue was one of economic justice, and in his view this proposition just made already rich people richer, and did nothing for poorer tribes.

 

It turned out his history class was researching the Feb. 5 ballot propositions. This had a lot of resonance for me because a seventh grade current events class assignment to report on the Vietnam war triggered my engagement with politics and, a few years later, my work as a "clean for Gene" foot soldier in the anti-war movement.

 

So by the time my son  and I got to the poll, we’d both discussed each proposition and decided on the vote together. When we reached Prop 93 -- term limits -- his input was, "I'd vote 'no' because it sounds tricky." So young, and already so wise to California's ballot proposition game.

 

The last propositions were the BAREC measures. "I don't know anything about those," my advisor admitted.

 

"I explain it for you later," I replied. After all, there is such a thing as information overload. And you can only stretch the teachable moment so far.  But like all teachable moments, you can’t mail it in. You have to be there.

 

Carolyn Schuk can be reached at cschuk@earthlink.net.