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Nick Jimenez
Nick
Jimenez, Caller-Times editor, writes a weekly editorial column Sundays. He can
be reached at 361-886-3787 or
jimenezn@caller.com.
Sunday, November 5, 2000
When you vote, take a kid along
By Tuesday night, it will be all over except for the, well, not shouting, but surely crying and gloating.
In America, we do everything to excess. We have been at this campaigning business now for all of this year and most of last. It's time to get it over with, vote and live with the results.
I do have one regret. Once again, Corpus Christi has been left off the presidential campaign trail. Neither of the major candidates, not even Ralph Nader, made a swing through our city.
I think this deprives us of full participation in the greatest single act of national democracy: seeing and touching the candidates up close. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush, quite naturally, have spent all their time campaigning in states where the race is undecided. Since Texas is considered a lock for Bush, we have been left in the national backwater.
The presidential candidates are the stars of politics. Americans like stars. Being a judicial candidate or running for county commissioner is important, but presidential candidates for the major parties draw the huge crowds. They are the ones who make elections and national politics come alive.
For places like Corpus Christi, national campaigns have been reduced to images on a TV screen. We have lost the huge campaign rally with the candidate waxing eloquent on the stump, the kind that used to take place in the early part of the 20th century in places like Artesian Park. Shirt-sleeved crowds would stand shoulder to shoulder, laborer and banker before the podium, the speakers exhorting the faithful to stand by their man. This was politics live and in the round.
The real losers here are kids and young people. Voting among younger voters is atrocious. Young people regularly tell pollsters that candidates are not talking to them about issues they care about. The appearances by Gore and Bush on Jay Leno and David Letterman are the closest to a relationship with the candidates that most younger voters can achieve.
As the candidates campaign on television, I see that the thousands who throng the rope lines often bring their kids. I'll bet those kids, even the youngest, will never forget that day. It is a little bit of history.
My kids date their involvement with politics to the day that mom and dad took them out to see Ronald Reagan when he visited Corpus Christi in 1980 during his first victorious campaign for the presidency. Now a graduate student, my daughter still remembers being carried on dad's shoulders in a sea of Republican supporters. That neither of us voted for Reagan really matters. What matters is that we got to involve our children in the political process.
My first memories of politics are of attending rallies with my parents. They were kind of like Mexican weddings: there was plenty to eat and drink, everybody knew everybody else, there was lots of music and meeting with friends and relatives. Oh, yeah, once in a while somebody got up and said vote Democratic. This was when the only Republicans we saw were at the end of the month when bills were collected.
I have tried to follow the example of my own parents who took me along when they went to the polls. I was a child impressed by the whirl of activity at the polls, the signs, the hangers-on, the thrusting of pamphlets into my parent's hands. Gee, I thought as a child, they really are big shots on this day.
Then we would go back home and they would discuss who they voted for and why at the supper table. And not before. They usually found out they had canceled each other's vote.
Voting is an acquired habit. We must nurture it among children and young people, showing them that voting and participating in the political process is part of what we do as Americans. We can only do that if we go to the voting booth ourselves. And when you do vote, take a kid along.
(Nick Jimenez can be reached at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.)
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