Building That Bridge

I learned from a young age that you should never reveal your weight, your salary or who you vote for. So while I will never tell who I am voting for in this election--check my bumper stickers, window signs and pin-up posters in my room if you want to try to deduce it--for the sake of illustration I will make an exception to the rule and let you peek inside my first trip to the voting booth.

The year was 1988, and election fever had hit my middle school. Perhaps envious of the public schools that actually got to close on election day and proudly house voting booths, someone came up with the idea of transforming our cafeteria into a fake polling place, complete with actual levers to pull. Statements of platforms were distributed, and we watched and discussed the debates in detail. As election day approached, I weighted my choices carefully and was a little nervous when I got to school that day.

At lunch time, I marched into the cardboard voting booth and proudly pulled the lever for...Reagan.

Maybe the reality of deficit spending had not hit me yet, or maybe I was a little unclear on party affiliation. All I knew this that I liked my president, I thought he was articulate, and I thought he should be president again.

If I remember correctly, my vote did not carry all that much weight in the outcome. My school was fairly progressive, and Reagan lost by a mile. But my eighth grade mind was still idealistic--I liked knowing that my vote was part of the final tally, and that I had had my say.

I must admit that was the last time I was actually all that excited about election day. In 1992 I was resentful that I had missed my first presidential vote by a little over a year. In 1994, I hated the outcome so much I spent two years ranting about the system.

And even this year, though I fell passionately that my candidate of choice should be re-, er, elected, truth be told, today is not such an exciting day for me. I will not be heading off to the polls at all. In fact, I voted over a month ago. In the comfort of my dorm room, I filled out my absentee ballot with a number two pencil, overwhelmed by the anti-climax of my first presidential vote. The local Baltimore races were equally uninspiring, since I am not quite close enough to home follow the issues well, so I made some uninformed guesses. (Then again, Cambridge is not enough of a home to me that I would feel comfortable voting here either. Even the Weld/Kerry race doesn't do much for me. From my ivory tower, my litmus test is that one is a Yalie and one's not.)

So I resigned myself to sealing my meaningless envelope and trying to muster the excitement to drop it in the mailbox with the same panache with which I would have pulled the lever. I would love to believe that envelope is even going to be opened in time to make a difference in the outcome, but I know that it will not.

In talking to students here, it seems that some people (reluctantly) voted absentee, that some people (reluctantly) registered in Massachusetts and that some people (reluctantly) aren't voting at all. I haven't run into all that many passionate people, certainly not anywhere near as passionate as my eighth grade class was about out mock polling setup.

Of course, one contributing factor could be that whether or not we are happy about it, tonight's outcome of the race seems to be a foregone conclusion. But no matter how uninspiring the election may be, we must recognize that from engineering the design to being on the consulting case team to trying to decide where it should be placed, it is the college students of today who will be instrumental in building the proverbial bridge to the twentieth century. We shouldn't just gather in Loker and the IOP to watch the outcomes--we should be part of the outcomes. So savor today, and look forward to many years of actual lever-pulling in the future. The country is ours to mold and change. And sure, perhaps I haven't gotten any less idealistic than in my eighth grade election, but at least now I'm voting for the right party.

Corinne E. Funk's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.