Voting as an Expression of Love and Gratefulness (dailygood.org)

Dana - this is so beautiful. Thank you for posting this thoughtful and timely piece. I am grateful for the right to vote and did so the first day of early voting. I do not take it for granted for a moment that were it not for the work of suffragettes and thousands of lives lost in war to protect our nation, I might not be able to vote. And that were I not a beneficiary of white privilege and a good job, easy transportation and of living where I do, voting could have been much more difficult, perhaps even life-threatening.

I love the work of the team at NC Child to help get out the vote of “unlikely voters,” people who have been, perhaps, intimidated by the process, have not grown up watching their parents or other role models vote, or who didn’t have the ability or documentation to get registered before.

In a year-long educational and non-partisan campaign, NC Child has worked throughout North Carolina to enlist service providers — therapist, social workers, counselors in communities of faith, workers at clinics and elsewhere — to help their clients, members, customers get registered to vote and ask for help getting to the polls.

One of the questions posed in this effort to engage new voters and help them reach out to candidates at the local, state, and federal level on several issues?

Is it good for the children?

The effort has been successful (I’ll add stats when I get them) and empowering on personal and organizational levels. For me, it has been inspiring, as I watched NC Child work with local organizations, including some of the ACEs initiatives in NC, to get the word out to service providers about how they could help. I found this inspiring as it is a non-partisan educational program that would be easy to replicate in any and every one of ACEs Connection’s more than 300 U.S. ACEs initiatives.

What part of that has to do with preventing and healing ACEs, building resilience?

Voting is empowering and healing. I felt a tremendous surge of energy and clarity as I filled in the bubbles on my ballot last week, and then fed the paper ballot into a machine, saw the machine light up a “ballot received” notice, and put my “I voted” sticker on my signature Contigo coffee mug. I can imagine that were I the descendent of slaves, as opposed to being a descendent of people whose family likely used slave labor, I would feel even more elation, along with some sadness about my ancestors not having had that right, and the fact that many present-day friends and relatives of color are oppressed at every turn in their journey to the polls. I do feel sad that some of my ancestors likely fought to preserve slavery; to help institite Jim Crow laws. I hope my work in the ACEs movement, with such an emphasis on being anti-racist and our work toward equity, further heals the part of me that feels shame about the racism in my family’s history. Racism is an ACE. Poverty is an ACE.  

The election of 2016 was a traumatic and demoralizing one for me; triggering many trauma responses, as the winner’s gaslighting, dehumanizing, blaming and shaming ways were reminiscent of abusers in my own childhood.  Being able to vote against that person now, four years after what I would call a remarkable healing journey, was indeed healing, as has been the satisfaction of making small donations to key senate races and, of course, to the Biden-Harris campaign.  

Whatever the outcome this week, I know have learned so much this last four years about the importance of staying hopeful, staying in the effort to create a trauma informed world where we all have to chance to thrive.  And yes, I feel extremely grateful for that embodied learning and healing.

*Whatever the issue or whomever the candidate.