Election Day in America

Today is Election Day in the United States. We often forget what a privilege it is to let our voices be heard. Although a day like today can be very contentious, instead of succumbing to the fearmongering and the vitriol, I would like to focus on the sentiments expressed by Walt Whitman, who wrote this poem during an election season filled with its own scandals:

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene

   and show,

’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor

   your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops

   ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor

   Mississippi’s stream:

This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small

   voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial

   choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to

        Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling— (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s): the

peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants,

      life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

Walt Whitman

Election Day, November, 1884