Voters head to a polling place to cast their ballots on the last day of early voting for the 2024 election on November 1 in Atlanta. Photo by Getty Images

Dear Gaia:

We briefly worked together on Election Day at the Los Angeles County Vote Center, handling over 900 advanced voters – one voter every four minutes for 13 straight hours!

You and the other two high school student workers look so dazed as you huddle over the news feeds on your phones. If we had more time to talk that day, here’s what I would have said to you:

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that “The world breaks them all, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places.” The world that breaks you early can be a very good thing, because you have a whole life ahead of you to become strong and resilient, disabused of naive and foolish illusions.

When my brother and I were young teenagers, we volunteered in the summer and fall of ’72 on George McGovern’s campaign, as sure a doomed presidential bid as I’ve ever been in my lifetime. Following the news, but somewhat ignorant of its realities, we poured our hearts and souls into the work of dissing the campaign, cold-called potential donors, walked flyers to factory gates, set up tables for events, wrote thank you notes and canvassed door to door. , up to and including transporting the elderly and disabled to the polls in my old 1950s Plymouth when I was a 16 year old first year driver.

When Election Night arrived, it was a blowout in 49 states, 520-17 in the Electoral College. McGovern didn’t even win his own home state of South Dakota. We sat around the TV in our headquarters and cried quietly. We were broken, but 50 years later, we are stronger in the broken places. Trust me, you’ll get over it too.

I want to ask you to try to put aside your bitterness and confusion about the result and think instead about some of those voters I witnessed. Remember Anjelica, a young Latina we recorded who quietly admitted that her place of residence was a homeless shelter. Steve, a one-legged man who hobbled slowly and painfully on crutches.

George, a Korean-American guy two years younger than me who looked 15 years older. He had no fixed address. “Yeah, you know, we had a place, but with the pandemic… family dynamics…” he trailed off. I asked where I could record it now; he gave me the address of one of the motels in town the owner rented out to homeless clients. He asked me if I knew of a way he could get on the list for The Montecito, a listed historic Mayan-themed art deco apartment building around the corner from the polling center that once housed a young Ronald Reagan and James Cagney, but which had been converted into housing for the elderly. He gave me a friendly punch and said, “I need some luck, bro.”

There was another young man, barely older than my older son, who slowly admitted that he was homeless and living on the street near the last apartment he had been evicted from. And I helped Blanca and Julio, an elderly newly registered Latino couple, who smiled as they collected the ballots I had issued and headed to the polling booths.

Gaia, let’s also remember the dedication of our fellow survey workers: Norma, a 20-year Filipino US veteran who wears her Desert Storm veteran cap every day; Tura, a multilingual licensed French-Italian-Persian-Azerbaijani architect who proudly showed me a picture of her with Frank Gehry when she worked on his team; Ross, another gay licensed architect who had escaped the repressive Indiana town to be himself and work in Los Angeles; Hana, our senior manager in the Philippines, a psychiatric nurse at a county hospital whose parents were also both retired nurses.

Together, these voters and we poll workers have all been part of the process that has helped ensure the continuation of American democracy, however flawed and flawed it may be, since George Washington was elected our first president in 1788. When your four grandfathers mine immigrated to America more than a century ago as Jews escaping persecution and death in Ukraine and Lithuania, and they too faced economic challenges and discrimination, but embraced unimaginable freedom. this country offered them to raise their voices and vote to have a say in their future. This is a privilege they bequeathed to me that, as a Jew and a descendant of immigrants, I can never take for granted. I have found nothing so satisfying as helping others secure and exercise their voting rights.

Gaia, you will have decades after my generation is gone to try to right our wrongs, as we ourselves tried to do when it was our turn. As bitter as the election result was, I hope you look back with pride on your experience with us at the polling station and never let temporary discouragements or disappointments shake your faith in the power of our vote to help fix the world.

your friend

Joel