Get Ready! Get Set! Vote!

This has to be the strangest voting year ever.  We’ve been ready to mark our ballots for…  well, it seems like forever.  The media has been full of voting news from other states for weeks and here in Oysterville we are chomping at the proverbial bit.

Our voters’ pamphlet arrived last week.  We’ve read it and discussed a few of the items briefly but we really know how we are going to mark our ballots.  When they come.  Which should be soon.  Presumably they were mailed out Friday and should get here tomorrow — today being a holiday.

Statue of Christopher Columbus Now Gone from South Chicago Court House

I’m actually not sure which holiday it is.  It used to be Columbus Day but then he got controversial…  I understand that fourteen states (including Oregon but not Washington) — plus 130 cities and Washington D.C. —  now celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day.  And, of course, some statues honoring Christopher Columbus are being removed.  In Boston,  Chris’s statue was beheaded which is hard to see as an act of patriotism rather than plain old vandalism.  As far as I know, however, (and  today’s Post Office closure would seem to indicate), the Federal Government still officially honors Columbus on this day.

Boston Beheading

The idea of “embracing change” is definitely becoming weird, at least to this old duck.  I’m positively nostalgic about those “olden days” when we actually went to our polling place to cast our ballots on the very day of the election.  I think we’ve been voting by mail in Pacific County since 2005 — but I’ve really lost track.

I’m not losing track of our ballot mailboxes, though.  Thanks to Fred Carter, there is a new one now at the Senior Center in Klipsan Beach — the closest one to us besides the Post Office.  For sure we’ll be headed to one or the other tomorrow afternoon if the pony express to Oysterville brings those ballots in the morning!

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