The air in my space lacks congruency today. There are chaotic workings at present where the particles don’t seem to gel, preferring to ricochet off each other in an apparent lack of direction. There is, therefore, a kind of excitement where projection is not certain and certainness is not proclaimed. I am left without a space of focused concentration or landing.
This is due, in part, to the rising waters all over parts of the Northwest including my basement. It is due in part to the elections and my anticipation of the direction my fellow citizens wish to collectively take over the next two years. It is due in part to my pending oral exams and the amount of sustained reading I must endure with the hopes that retention also occurs. How odd that my basement retains water it was created to repel, and how my brain seeps out remembrances that it was created to retain. The irony is not lost to me. If I only had the secret of my basement.
So . . . concentration is shot to hell as I alternatively read a page, write a sentence, scan the internet and TV for news of the elections and river flooding. Here in the Northwest there is valid worry regarding the 8th district race between Rep. Dave Reichert and his democrat opponent Darcy Burner. The race has been far from polite and is one of those painfully close races. This is why there is great concern regarding the rain and flooding here – as if the flooding of one’s house was not enough in those parts most affected by the rains. Several voting areas are closed down because of the flooding and voters are being directed to go a mile to two miles away from their original voting places. One wonders if the rain and the flooding have become partisan in attitude. Of course not being able to speak to the water entity, one will never really know. But disenfranchising comes in many forms, purposeful and accidental . . . we simply reap or morn the results.
More reports of disenfranchising are pouring in throughout the country. In Virginia, with the painfully close race between Sen. George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb, there are complains of fraudulent phone calls directing voters to wrong polling stations or intimidating them by insisting that they are not registered to vote in Virginia and so if they showed up, they would be “charged criminally.”
Voting machines are the cause of other forms of disenfranchising. At an elementary school in Cleveland, Ohio, all the machines were down for two hours. We are told that this school was in a predominantly black district. Why is it always in the poor districts, for the most part, that such things happen? Or, do we just not get informed about the machines that crash in the ‘rich’ areas? And one wonders why conspiracy lives on!
Then there are cases where we disenfranchise ourselves such as when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanfort shot himself in the foot as he forgot to bring his registration card with him when he went to vote.It seems that Sanfort is suffering from the same lack of concentration that I have today. I am just glad that I voted already, when my mind was cleared. Now I wait the outcome, contested or not. It looks like it will be a very long wet day.
