The Upcoming Election is the Fight the Nation Has Been Waiting For

By Irv Leavitt, from his Honest Context column series

This week, I got a call I had been dreading. 

The Chicago Board of Elections wanted to know if I wanted to be an election judge again this November.

I do not want to be an election judge.

Well, I want to, but I don’t want to risk my life to do it. I am not in perfect health, so I do not want to consort with hundreds of people who may or may not be in the habit of brushing their teeth or changing their underwear, let alone diligently washing away virus cooties.

I want to end election day still in good enough shape to see the inauguration. 

But by the time I finally got the call, I was ready to say Yes. Louis DeJoy sealed the deal for me.

He made it meaningful. He made it poetic. 

No matter what happens next, his ordering all those sorting machines dragged out of post offices probably took away so much confidence from prospective mail voters that it will swell the number of those voting in person. Even though he’s promised to stop trying to kill the postal system, and despite whether he’s forced to replace some of the machines -- and the looted mailboxes -- many voters’ belief in mailed ballots might be shot. 

So I’m prepared to see voters line up, six feet distanced, at the 40th Ward precinct where I’ll be working, out the door and down Western Avenue, around the corner down Peterson Avenue, and west a couple of blocks. I picture them sending emissaries down the street to Wolfy’s, picking up hot dogs to sustain them as they wait in line to take their country back. 

And they will be risking their lives to do it. 

We will have plexiglass shields and the adequate stock of cleaning supplies that we didn’t have for the primary, I’ve been told. But everyone knows it will still be fraught.

People all over the world take risks while voting in elections, as they try to pry away dictators, braving guns and bombs. Our principal nemeses are viruses, too small to see. But dead is dead.

In Illinois, we have taken the right to vote for granted in recent decades. 

But suffrage is a big deal. 

It used to be tough for a lot of people to vote in this country. For a long time, Blacks and women couldn’t. Neither could white men who didn’t own land. They all had to fight for the right to have a say in running their own country. Not until 1965, with the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, was the right to vote everywhere in the U.S. protected by law. 

The greatest assault on American voting rights since those days is underway now, especially in the South. Voting rolls are being purged. Voter identification is back. Early voting has been cut. 

But I think the electorate is ready to do what it takes. For the first time in my lifetime, people are standing up against existential threats: climate change, economic inequality, racism. Especially racism, the shame of a nation that cruelly used each group of minorities to benefit people who never returned the favor.

We have been waiting for the millennials and Generation Z to get involved. They are involved now, in spades.

They were a sleeping giant, and we all know how they were awakened. At the moment when the American soul was exposed as rotten, they were watching. They were already aware of the great inequalities and unfairnesses in the nation and the rest of the world, but they hadn’t been mad enough to pour into the streets. 

They put their shoes on when it was most important.

Years ago, when I was a young reporter in central Florida, a harried Republican politician remarked to me, “The most dangerous man in politics is the man who is out of work.”

Not only are unemployed people upset by their circumstances, but they have the time to do something about them, he said. 

That happened all across the country this spring. People of all races and ages and genders were faced with just how unfair American life was at the moment they had time to act. And as this American Spring turns to summer and fall, we have many leaders in power who are so selfish and venal that the choice is easy.

The young and the active have an opportunity to turn them out. They should be replaced by much better leaders, though not necessarily ones who are ideologically equipped to take the nation where it needs to go to truly be kind and fair to all its people.

Those leaders exist, but they are still in the roadways with their bicycles and umbrellas, megaphones and goggles and first aid kits.

It will be their turn soon, and sooner than most older people might imagine. 

The upcoming election is their first big battle in the real struggle for the soul of the nation. 

I want to be there Nov. 3 to facilitate their desire to fight for their future. It’s my moment as well as theirs.

Perhaps it won’t go as well for all of we poll workers as we hope. Maybe, like Moses, we will start the march to the promised land, but never see it ourselves. 

It’s no big deal. There are millions of essential workers who risk their lives daily to bring food, health care and other necessities to their fellow Americans. They deserve my support, our support, in every polling place in the nation. 

Election day is only one day, but it will be a day we’ll remember as long as we live.