I’m standing in a bar downtown, having squeezed my Saturn SUV between a BMW and a Mercury Sable.  A cadre of young lawyers shifts their feet back and forth, holding square white china plates and crystal stems.  It’s a post-mortem (slash) thank-you party for the Democratic poll challengers from the mid-term election that cost our party the Senate.

So, I’m telling a newly minted attorney about getting a ballot for my Republican curmudgeon and assisting him in casting his vote for Senator Roberts.  He smiles:  He isn’t bothered by my having aided-and-abetted the enemy because what I did was an act of love for a dying man.  Then he tells me about being the only black person at the poll to which he had been assigned in Eastern Jackson County, and how the election judge referred to him on the telephone as “a handsome young black man”.  It would be almost funny if the judge hadn’t been resisting letting him come into the polling place, which our credentials allowed us to do.

But mostly, we’re talking about the importance of voting — the act of civil involvement, a citizen’s participation in the political process.  We talked about instigating a bi-partisan effort to improve the polling process; the dysfunctional electronic voting machines; the willingness of the Election Board to hear our critique of the process.  I’m the oldest person at the table.  I’ve been working in politics for forty-five years.  I’m tired.  I like the energy but I’m no longer an integral part of it. These people, this dozen lawyers in their twenties and thirties: they represent the future.

In middle-age, I no longer work a ten-hour shift under a blazing sun to get a candidate elected.  But what I’ve seen in this election upsets me.  I worked four polling places and two of them had serious accessibility issues.  Then I went to my own voting place and fell down a flight of stairs.  My new challenge, then? A subcommittee of lawyers with one goal and one goal only:  to make the voting process as seamless for disabled voters as it is for the able-bodied.

I’ll drink to that.