Vote.

(c) 2012 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

I am waiting to vote tomorrow.

I am waiting to vote until I can bring both of my daughters with me, to the polling place, to cast my vote, my say for the future of our nation.

140 years ago today, Susan B. Anthony voted illegally.  She was later arrested and found guilty of illegal voting due to her gender. 100 years and about a month before my birth.  It wasn't until 1920, a single year before my old, historic house was built, that women officially received the right to vote.

I am voting tomorrow because it is my right, my privilege, and my duty.  _I_, as a citizen of the United States, have the opportunity to make my tiny voice heard. Sure, my single vote is an itsy-bitsy percentage of my county, let alone of my state, or of the nation as a whole.  Put that way, it seems ludicrous to bother.

Yet the direction of this nation is made up of all those individual votes just as the tide is made up of individual droplets of water.  Sure, I have my own opinion and hopes as to the results of this election and to the individual races being run, but what matters, in the end, is that I spoke up.  I had my say, made my choices, took part in our democracy.

Because one of the most important things is that I have the right and the opportunity to vote.  MY vote counts as much as any other, cast by anyone of any particular creed, gender, race, orientation, tax bracket, influence, BMI, political afflication or favorite football team.  

To not vote would be to throw that all away.  Please, if you are an American citizen, vote.