Obama vs. Romney: Choose Your Future

Obama's speech accepting the nomination at the DNC Thursday may have overused the word "choice" just a tad, but it sure got the point across. If the speech wasn't perhaps as soaring and inspirational as we could have hoped, in retrospect, I believe that was because he was not trying to convince us of anything--merely to remind us: of what has been accomplished or begun in the past four years, of the work still left to do, and of the weight of our decision in November. I certainly felt more solemn when he was finished than I did in 2008, because I experienced in a visceral way that very real weight on my shoulders. Where in 2008 there was this uplifting, nearly ecstatic "anything is possible" feeling about casting my vote, this time around--with what is shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election--I and likely many others will go to the polls, or sit home and fill out our mail-in ballot, with a grave sense that our voices MUST be heard, or the future will be very dark indeed.

I'll never forget 1984, when Reagan was up for reelection--I was just 21, on a study trip in Britain from July to mid-November. When the election rolled around, I was living in London, and I realized with shock that, in my first-ever chance to vote in a presidential election, I would not get that opportunity--I had neglected to file an absentee ballot in time! I went to sleep that night with this awful sense of dread, and the hopeless feeling that there was nothing--not a solitary thing--that I could do about it. When I awoke the next morning, I went down to the curbside newspaper box and bought a paper, staring dumbly at the headlines: "Reagan Reelected!", or some such thing. I've never spent a more depressing day in my life. My vote might not have changed the course of that election, but if every U.S. student studying overseas had remembered to cast a ballot... well, you get the picture.

The 2008 election taught me--and so many of us--that one vote DOES matter, because it is not just one, but one and one and one and one and... as Clinton reminded us Wednesday night in a slightly different context, "You do the math."

With just 60 days now, before the November election, it's time to sharpen my pencil, so to speak, and start putting my skills to work in the best cause I know--crafting letters, emails, op-eds, or anything else that might connect to one or more folks out there who have any notion of sitting out the vote, to remind them that "one and one and one" of us are absolutely essential if we are to reelect the man VP Biden described as having "profound concern for the average person," a man of "patience, wisdom, courage, and grace." Put those qualities up against "the other guy's" record, and the "choice" could not be more clear. For me, the time has come to put a "voice" to that "choice."