The first time I did it was in 1968. Vote, that is. Back then you had to be 21 to vote but, in many states, only 18 to drink. Funny how things change.
In retrospect, there are those who suggest that I should have held my nose and voted for the Humphrey-dome. Instead, I ordered an absentee ballot from Kansas City and cast my first-ever presidential vote for Dick Gregory. For Senator, I wrote in my dad. To this day I have no regrets about those decisions and the memories of all the events which led up to them remain incredibly vivid.
I felt then, and still feel today, that we were in the midst of a war at the time, one being fought in the streets of America and in the soul of its citizens. In February I had arrived in Fayetteville, Tennessee as a VISTA Volunteer, moving right up to the frontline of battle. We had been invited to come work in the community but it became painfully obvious that not everyone wanted us there. We were quickly branded communists for caring that over half of the adult male population in the county was functionally illiterate. The War-on-Poverty's $5 as an incentive to convince many of these poor heads-of-household to attend classes, taught by us known radicals, in order to learn to write and read their native language, that small investment was considered by the local power structure to be blatant outside interference in their lives and none of anyone else's business, certainly not the federal government's or ours. In war jargon, we were the enemy and the battle was being fought on their turf.
It was not exactly the age of enlightenment on our side either. There were precious few programs available to assist poor women with similar needs. We were under strict orders from Washington to be non-political. Segregation, for example, was deemed to be a political issue. Public opposition by us to our government's policies and actions going on in southeast Asia was certainly forbidden. The joy, however, for this twenty year old of seeing our students be able to properly endorse that $5 check from uncle Sam, rather than simply using an "x" as they had always done, that joy was real and also extremely energizing. The larger notion that our work was helping to truly change the ways of the past and make the future a little brighter for people kept driving us to do more and to get more involved. Revolutionary ideals aside, my own eyes were definitely being opened as never before.
The assassination of Martin Luther King that April hit me hard. This event had a radicalizing effect on what was already a very challenging cross-cultural experience. A group of us travelled the 150 miles or so to Memphis a few days later to participate in that city's demonstration by striking sanitation workers and thousands of others in marching for justice. Peace seemed almost out of the question. But people were coming together, good people. It was, at least that day in Memphis, a revolution of hope.
I got turned on by a politician for the first time that year too, Eugene McCarthy. He inspired tremendous energy and a certain faith in the basic goodness of humankind. He said that war didn't make sense, certainly not distant wars on foreign battlefields, fighting, killing other humans because of a military industrial complex that needed its own type of fix. Not when there was a much more important war happening right here in our own corner of the world. One that had to be won, and now was the time.
In my own mind Robert Kennedy seemed to share much of this same vision that Spring but his late entrance into the presidential sweepstakes was disheartening. Suddenly it was party politics, down and dirty. McCarthy was too gentle a man to win at such an ugly game. And then, in June, just to prove how mean, and real, the whole thing was, we lost Bobby. The hope of a couple months earlier was quickly turning into despair.
Later that same week I turned legal voting age.
Playing by the rules was losing its meaning. In August I decided to drive my '61 Chevy north for a meeting of the minds on the streets of Chicago. There was no doubt by then that the Democratic Party was no better than the Republicans as they were about to coronate Hubert, the loyal servant, while somehow forgetting who Gene McCarthy was or what he had been trying to tell us for a year, or what Martin and Bobby had given their lives for. As soon as the power structure had reestablished law and order in our own streets they would take care of those pesky Vietnamese too. Hope had essentially vanished but it was worth one more loud "fuck-you", one that the entire world would hear and see.
Senator McCarthy and his forces were there helping to lead us as was Dick Gregory. I only saw them from a distance but it was important to have them with us. It was a great feeling for me to be but one of a hundred thousand individuals in this mass movement yet share an incredible closeness with all these brothers and sisters. My first taste of tear gas was not pleasant. Chicago police and National Guardsmen fueled a full-blown riot. The word "pigs" took on a new meaning for many of us. But somehow, I managed to not be arrested (and hence kicked out of VISTA) and headed back to the cotton harvest in Tennessee, back to where my work was. And cashed government checks so that I could eat, wondering more than ever about life's paradoxes.
In October, the requested absentee ballot arrived from Missouri with instructions that it be filled out in the presence of some officer of the law, or the court, and duly witnessed by them in order to be valid. So up to the courthouse I marched, you know the type, the county's tallest building sitting inside the town square, surrounded by aging white men puffing on cigars, watching attentively as people of color used different facilities than they did and waiting to eat lunch at the town's finest cafe, a place where they could sit and eat peacefully while blacks could only order food to go.
Anyhow, up those steps I went to do my patriotic duty for the first time and wound up sitting under the glaring eyes of the local Sheriff as I wrote in Dick Gregory's name for President and John Elmer, Sr.'s name for Missouri's next Senator. I handed it to him and gave him my own glare as he signed it and gave it his official stamp of approval. The law said he had no choice. It was all I could do to not raise a clenched fist in victory.
I am sorry if my vote that year possibly helped to elect Richard Nixon but I am proud that I did what I thought was the only right thing to do at the time. I had voted for someone and for a conviction and a purpose and a reason. It was much more than a protest vote. It counted.
They say you never forget the first time you do it. Vote, that is. I don't ever intend to. Peace!
John Elmer
October 10, 1992