Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Brushes with history

All set to perform my civic duty today I got up dark and early this morning and arrived at the small school that we go to for our polling place just before 7am. There were no parking spots all around the school so I ended up going down a side street to walk to the school – by the time I got inside everyone else in the immediate area was in there too and the line went down the length of the basketball court!! What a madhouse! I really did want to get it over with so I wouldn't have to bring kids with me to wait in line. Chris ended up working from home so it did give us some flexibility in getting out there but he still had to get work done so I opted not to stay to wait around. By the time I went back around 12:30 there were 2 people ahead of me and I went right through I was voter number 716!! I guess they were busy!!

As I opted out of my first opportunity to vote I couldn't help but wonder if the lines would be like that all day. Then I was thinking about last week when I was just steps away from one of the gathering places of the city of Philadelphia while the Phillies were within reach of winning the world series, well the night just got rainier and colder until they decided to stop the game to re-start it a few days later. So not only was the game not won, I had to drive down the turnpike in bad weather, that's never a fun thing to do. Of course once they resumed the game they won and the whole town went wild but that was while I was back out in the boonies here in Chester county and even though it's an area that's tied to and very close to the city there really wasn't a whole lot of celebrating in the streets around here, uh, woo hoo....

I did have the chance to be in DC years ago when the Redskins won the Superbowl and that was cool - going down Pennsylvania Ave to Georgetown in the car of someone we didn't know until the people walking were going faster than we could drive. At the time I couldn't believe I was seeing people hanging out sitting on second story building ledges and climbing on stoplights and every one high-fiving everyone else. Now the past of that historic event that I saw was very cool. That was okay because no one did anything stupid to hurt anyone else and it was all innocent fun. From what I understand the Philly crowd - in places wasn't so controlled breaking a store window and overturning cars. Just after the game was won you could see people lighting fireworks in the crowd - duh, not a good idea! Maybe it was just as well that I didn't have to decide to go into the crowd or not.

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