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I Voted for Bush in 2000
by Jessica Clair
November 2004
I voted for Bush in 2000. I'm not proud of it and it's been highly classified until now, but I'm learning that mistakes are okay and admitting them is good therapy. In 2000, I was 23 years old, married to a Dupont chemist, and living in a white, middle class Delaware suburb. My parents and religious-right circle of friends and family voted for Bush, too, because that's what Jesus would have done. By that time I wasn't so sure about Jesus anymore, but I pulled that lever with conviction, anyway.
A lot of things changed between my 2000 lever pull and 2004 button push. Like most of my friends, I had married early and never finished college. Suddenly in 2001, I found myself separated, working my way through college on a receptionist's salary. My boss kept me busy photocopying pictures of his boat and Wall Street Journal articles on the rich's unfair tax burden; he had inherited a large sum of money, but then had invested that money and made himself. As for me, I made a lot of hot dog ramen noodle stirfrys.
But I got by. I looked for roommates to help with the rent and wound up with friends who taught me about lighting Channukah candles, single parent families, and racial inequality. And I learned things that Bob Jones University Press had somehow omitted from my high school textbooks. In those last years of school, I gained a sense of possibility that changed my goals in life.
While the rest of my January 2003 class was walking at commencement, I was moving into a little apartment in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood. I found a job in Center City coordinating mental health services where each day, I read case notes about people with “work and life stress,” people who live in fear of violence, who cope with substance abuse, who are depressed, anxious, and stretched to capacity. It got me thinking about life in cubicles, offices, and factories across the country. I thought about people showing up every day at jobs that barely support their families, struggling through without help, trapped.
Back in 2000, there were so many things that I didn't know I didn't know. I was sure that what I had been taught as a child, that in the United States, anyone could achieve anything, was true. But now, after work, I take the subway to Cecil B. Moore station and attend graduate classes in social work. We talk about how that's not true, how anyone can't achieve anything, and how it won't be true until we provide social justice and basic human rights, a living wage for each person and access to good education and health insurance. I can't escape from others anymore, whether they be the kids playing in the projects I pass near the train station, or the homeless man wearing trash bags that calls to me on my walk to work.
There has been a lot of talk about George Bush and isolationism. But there is another sense of isolation in the United States, one so broad and insidious that it blinds us to the needs of others and causes us, on our way to the top, to step on their backs. And then there is the isolation of flaunting our “self-made” accomplishments as a salve for loneliness and detachment. And the sense of isolation that is simply homogeneity, the presumption that what is best for ourselves and our circle is best for all people, everywhere.
I voted for Kerry in 2004. But the truth is that I don't think it was too much of a choice. The best candidate probably never had a chance to raise enough money, or join Skull and Bones. I wonder who Jesus would have voted for. Maybe he would have been too busy performing miracles and asking people to please, not to wear those silly WWJD bracelets, to make it to the polls. Maybe we have all been fooled into thinking that one vote cast in one booth can set into motion the mechanics of a just government. Or maybe we have been lulled into complacency, content to pull a lever or push a button or check a box that transfers our responsibility for others away from ourselves and sends it to the halls of Washington, D.C. Some presidents are be better stewards of our citizenship than others, but it looks like we can't count on that this time. For the next four years, we're all going to have to help each other out.
Jessica Clair can be contacted at jiexi@hotmail.com.
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