Vote-B-Gone(tm)

Do you vote?

It's easy to forget, as I sit here today, that in 1917, women went to jail for me. They endured beatings, squalid living conditions, vermin-infested food, force feedings and more because they wanted me to have the freedom to vote. My own grandmother was born into a world where half of the population was forbidden to cast a ballot.

Easy, too, to not think too much about the "religious persecution" that brought the pilgrims here in the first place. The fact that for centuries Catholics and protestants burned, maimed, tortured and murdered one another because one group or another was out of favor of the king or queen doesn't have real meaning for American voters -- even though it should.

Forget the American Revolution -- almost everyone else has. Do you remember anything about the Quartering Act of 1774, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre? I stood on a ship in Boston Harbor and tried to wrap my mind around what had been bought for me with blood and sacrifice and I finally got it, just a little bit. But that was years ago.

I drove through Philadelphia Mississippi and I thought about the horrors endured by Civil Rights protesters of the 1960s. I stood in front of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama and contemplated each name and date on the black marble. And I wonder now if we have distilled the essence and the message of Martin Luther King Jr. into just another bank holiday.

The thousands of men and women who died in war are just another historical footnote while we sit, fat, dumb and happy, flipping channels and opting out of our sacred duty to choose a representative government. Certain young people in my life inform me in an offhand way that they don't plan to vote because "they're just not interested". The 2000 election expected 19 million evangelical Christians to vote - but four million of them sat out the third closest presidential election in history.

We bat the word freedom around a lot these days and hopefully it isn't losing its context. Freedom to me means that as I cast my ballot this year, it has a significance that people in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia can only dream of. It's not just my right to go and physically cast my ballot without coming to harm. It's the power of the paper -- that my vote does dictate to an elected official what I want my country to be, how I want to live and what legacy I'd like to leave. It's the sole reason why immigrants flood our borders, why people love us, hate us, envy us and sometimes wish they were us.

November 2 is my President's Day, Martin Luther King Day, Veteran's Day, Fourth of July, Patriot's Day and Women's Equality Day all rolled into one. As the ballot passes from my hands and on to the electoral college, I will not forget how it got there.