The Electric Election

They told me the line was four hours long when I finally found the beginning of it this morning in Norwalk, Calif. The Los Angeles County Recorder's office is the only location for early voting for all 4.1 million registered voters in L.A. County. I had arrived at 8:30 a.m., just 30 minutes after the scheduled openinf, but the line already stretched around the building to the makeshift voting tents. Luckily, I soon found out that, since I had already filled out my absentee ballot, I could just go ahead and drop it in the box.

I was almost disappointed not to stand on line with the others who were casting their ballot. The feeling was electric. Whole families waited on line. Everyone was smiling, or seemed to, happy to be a part of something monumental. We have for too long had too low a voter turnout, which has enabled a vocal minority to control the nation's agenda. Not this year.

To see Los Angeles turn out in such numbers early on a Saturday morning, when we're usually sleeping in, was to see America's second largest city come together as a community; a community determined to make its voice heard. To me, it was also that point on a long journey when you come around the final bend in the road to see the destination you have looked forward to.

Forty years ago, I was a high school freshman in the Bronx, swimming in a politically charged pool of hope and tragedy. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. America's cities - New York among them - were seething with racial tension. A war raged in Southeast Asia and buildings crumbled in our own urban centers.

Political discussions were commonplace at our dinner table, and at those of my aunts, uncles and cousins. My father was a union man. He led strikes, helped organize and fought for better wages and working conditions, all to make a better life for our family.

So it was in that atmosphere that during high school, and later in college, I joined demonstrations in support of civil rights and the stillborn Equal Rights Amendment. It was a mystical time, a spiritual time, a cosmic time. It was a time not long after the big bang of Brown vs. Board of Education and the fundamental justice of the Civil Rights Act. It was also the beginning of our nation's inevitable and necessary journey to a new globally-informed, inclusive universe.

The destination is in sight, but we are not there yet. Not until we can wake up on Wednesday morning to the redeeming words, "President-elect Barack Obama."