Camila and I are walking down the avenue, with around us a fish-school rainbow of college students. Their noise goes up to the sky, after school starts, in a good natured sort of clamor, everyone wanting to be heard. My main thoughts, surrounded by this variety of humanity, usually center on the fact that next year I will join them, that I’m not always going to be in this in-between place without a goal.
Right now the political front has wormed its way into the fibers of the collegiate crowd. Good natured twenty-somethings walk around with clip-boards asking “Are you registered to vote?” in voices that hold just the right amount of desperation to be manipulative without making you feel too pressured.
Earlier, while in the bustling, newly refurbished cafeteria waiting for our too sweet slightly chemical flavored smoothies, a woman a few years over twenty, had come to us. Her brown hair was shiny and pulled into a high ponytail, her pink glossed lips wearing a smile that I’d call strained except for all the practice she’d put into it, and she wore a black t-shirt, over her slightly chubby frame, bearing the phrase “Got Votes? “Are you two gals registered to vote?” she asked, leaning up to our table invitingly.
“I am.” I quickly interjected. I had gotten registered at the DMV while picking up my Learner’s Permit for driving the week prior.
Camila looks at the woman across from her a moment before saying, “I was planning on doing it later.”
So the woman opens up, leaping into her persuasive monologue, end result being Camila with a voter registration form in front of her - and me, trying to make small talk conversation with the woman (as I’m already registered I was a little out of her dimension of perception).
“So…” I said, using the time-honored method of those that don’t really know what they are going to say next.
She looked at me for the first time since she’d found out I was already one of the voting cult. “Yeah?” She replied.
“Are you guys getting a lot more voters this year?”
Apparently I’d done something right with the topic I’d chosen, because her face lit up. “Oh yes! We’ve got over a third more students registering this year! The dorms are helping out too; the dorm with the most new registered voters gets a prize so, that helps.”
(Here the phrase ‘enlightened self-interest’ waltzed its way merrily across my brain.) “This sounds like something you’re really passionate about.”
“Oh yeah. We can change the future by voting. I mean, it’s not a lot but at least it’s something right?”
I ventured a timid “Mmmhmm…”
“Besides,” she added, “I’m being paid.”
Camila finished her form and handed it over with a flourish. After a small discussion of particulars, the woman moves on.
We go outside to the avenue, the avenue where our narrative began. Out there, there is a table. Around it stand the twenty-somethings previously mentioned, sporting shining grins and “Got Votes?” t-shirts. Modern music favorites blast out over the crowd. Life-sized cardboard cut-outs of McCain and Obama remind me of the cut-outs of Legolas and Captain Jack Sparrow my friend Molly has kept in her room since middle-school. It interests me to notice more of the solicitous youths gather around the Obama cut-out than the McCain cut-out. I point this out to Camila.
“He can’t help it.” She says, “He’s a hottie with a naughty body. That’s why I’m voting for him.”
“Camila!” I cry, askance. It’s a phrase I’d never thought I’d hear from Camila’s mouth.
“I’m joking, I’m joking.” She puts emphasis on the second syllable of ‘joking’, giving is a southern border twang. “But that’s what some are saying you know?”
And I do know. My house-mate Kory won’t be voting this year, as she’s still seventeen, but if I got a penny for the number of times I’ve heard her say “I’m gonna vote for Obama, he’s HOT!” I’d have, let’s see, $2.32.
I suppose voting by the superficial is okay. My Grandma on my Mama’s side, who I will say looks like Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove, has voted by superficial context for the past 66 years, as long as the handsome man was suitably conservative and Republican. Still it’s no way to make change, right?
Similarly voting for a person merely because they are something different doesn’t strike me as too wise. Like some of my peers toward the beginning of the presidential race that talked of voting for Mrs. Hilary Clinton, solely on the basis of gender, without consideration to the platform she was running on.
One of my friends, a mural artist by the name of Ingrid, gave this suggestion as I laid down the base coat of paint on a dragon. Let’s make the elections anonymous. Let’s give our candidates an insert-face-here shape, and electronically distort their faces. Then once the race is run let the curtain come off! Let it be a ‘ta-da’ experience. Let it be that in the end, when all is revealed we find that our candidate is female, black and Jewish, and guess what? (This is the really important bit here.) It doesn’t matter, because she was voted in for her ideas, for her brain, not for the color of her skin, not for her gender. It’s only then we could have a truly color-blind America.
