What Are You Doing Tomorrow?

The death toll for campaign staff and election workers during the elections a year ago numbered twenty-one, according to Tabish Forugh of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission. Another twenty-one people were wounded.
Back in March, the turnout for the election in Iraq was sixty-two percent. This was in spite of attacks that killed thirty-eight people. Contrast that to our last general election, the one in 2008, where we saw sixty-one percent of our registered voters in the the U S of A show up at the polls.
There are a couple of things that struck me about this news: First, and perhaps most obviously, it has been some time since anybody was shooting at potential voters in our country. Violence on election day is limited primarily to those hanging chads. Secondly, how do we reconcile the fact that these fledgling democracies seem to have greater participation than the country that is out there trying to plant and fertilize them?
I know. We've been at it for almost two hundred and fifty years. Representative democracy: ho hum. My boss won't let me have time off work. I just spaced it. This Tuesday? Really? Or how about everyone's favorite: "It doesn't matter anyway. They're all idiots."
The suggestion that we shouldn't vote because it only encourages them was tired before P.J. O'Rourke got to it. It is the opportunity that we have to make a difference in our daily lives in a simple, yet profound way. The stories of our elections have become mundane because of their relative calm and efficient occurrence. Glitches like the presidential election of 2000 are the exceptions that prove the rule. If more registered voters had found their way to their polling places way back at the turn of the century, Albert Gore might never have won an Academy Award.
It is the part of the otherwise nutso rhetoric that flows from the tea-bags of the party of frightened Americans: participation. Maybe it takes a certain amount of anger or fear to become completely connected to the democratic process, but perhaps it doesn't have to be a life or death proposition.
Vote.