Andrea Masciari

Voting in America humbles me a bit, even now, so many years after my eighteenth birthday.  While I stand in the voting booth and fill in the check boxes of my chosen candidates and referendum issues, I understand how profound and critical this process is to the protection and continuation of our democracy and indeed, to the progress (or the detriment) of the entire world.  I am not one of those Americans who believe we are number one in everything we do and in every utterance we speak or write.  Nor do I support every decision our government makes on our behalf, in the name of our constitution, of those founding fathers who, we sometimes forget, did not always have the best of intentions for the sake of the common good.  Greed is greed, then and now, and as we recognize our leaders’ shortcomings, great and small, we realize that our place in the world, our standing in the eyes of those so much less fortunate than us, no longer looms larger than life itself.  And I cringe at the realization of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leading the charge entrusted to them.  But I digress.

Life is full of humor and comedic antics, and like most humans, finding that humor in our daily lives brings great respite from an otherwise stressful existence.  My friends, Svetlana and Miroslav, have allowed me to find such relief, at their expense, in the voting process of these divisively united states.  As newly confirmed American citizens, they take great pride in this privilege of deciding who will lead us and which laws will guide our lives.  Yet, after all the seriousness of their induction ceremony that I proudly witnessed at Faneuil Hall in 2003, their first election encompassed our very own dog kennel noise issue.  After decades of Tito’s rule, then years of bombs and chaos and all the things that war eliminates from ordinary life - necessities like stability, electricity, food and joy -my friends mustered up the courage to immigrate to a faraway, unknown land.  This land promised them a chance at the dreams and the very first ballot they cast was meant to eliminate or perpetuate a bunch of noisy dogs.  As a true American who respects the secrecy of that booth, I never asked them how they voted.  But knowing them as well as I do, I have an idea of what their decisions were on that rainy April day.

In former Yugoslavia, where Communism and then radical Islam affected their daily lives for many years, they embarked upon a journey to the United States of America where their opinions would be heard, their dreams fulfilled, and their sense of wanderlust profoundly impacted by the autonomy allowed by our free society.  Svetlana and Miroslav could now impose their democratic views in the voting booth, thereby relinquishing the repression of a communist upbringing.  And this is what America is all about, is it not?  This is what it means to be created equal and to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor.  An American voting booth – that coveted place of a free and democratic society – so often devoid of the majority of people eligible to make their voices heard.