Single issue

In 1980, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter presented a marked contrast in most voters' minds. Not in mine. At 19 years old, registered as a Republican and preparing to vote for the first time, my single issue was the re-establishment of draft registration. The two major-party candidates were both for. I was most decidedly against.

Too young to experience the 1960s, I was still old enough to remember the latter part of that decade. I remembered watching the strange shape of Vietnam over the anchorman's shoulder, the line shifting, the numbers changing. So many of us, so many of them. So many of us, so many of them. So very many of us--and so many, many more of them.

I also vividly remembered the 1960s' sense--now sadly lost to most of the middleaged and older, and never present in the lives of those who are younger--that another world was possible. We could arrange our lives very differently from what we'd been told. Blacks and women and the poor and gays and lesbians and people from other countries could be embraced as the equals of rich white American men. Compassion, cooperation, tolerance, and dialogue could prevail over competition, bigotry, and war. We could make it all happen. It was our responsibility to do so.

That's what brought me out into the Indiana summer heat in 1980, carrying pen and clipboard and my first of many bags of "lit"--independent candidate John Anderson's campaign literature. Anderson was against draft registration, and he needed 7500 registered voters' signatures to get on the ballot in Indiana after he lost the race for the Republican nomination. That's about the sum total of what I knew about him, but it was enough to motivate me to get my one percent of those signatures, no matter how long it took or how much hostility I encountered.

Some of that hostility came from my own dad, who mystified me by refusing to sign Anderson's petition. Surely, I thought, even if he doesn't like the guy's politics and would never vote for him, he should understand and support his right to be on the ballot.

I had more faith in my dad's objectivity and principles than they deserved. My parents had started secretly opening my mail, and some of it was from the CCCO (www.objector.org). I wasn't a member, but--given my single issue--I was interested. My parents, to be fair, were scared. They remembered Joseph McCarthy and the era of the blacklist. A connection to an organization of conscientious objectors could ruin my life. The government might target me.

I thought if that's really the case--if my government would deny me that basic right guaranteed to me by the First Amendment--well then, all the more reason--all the more *obligation*--to oppose such a government. I finished collecting my signatures, John Anderson got on the ballot in Indiana, and I voted for him. But I was on my way to leaving electoralism behind.

In a way I'm still a single-issue voter, although now I vote far more often with my feet as an activist than with my hand in the voting booth. My single issue now is social justice in all its forms and every context, and that election--that choice to get involved and do your part--is always going on. Another world *is* possible. Take it from someone who got a glimpse of it that she can never forget.