Because I am American and because I am free.

I just got home from voting. I registered at the polling place by showing my electric bill and saying I am who I say I am. I voted against a civil unions ban, against reinstating the death penalty, for reducing the cost of healthcare and providing universal healthcare and for a bond for Madison schools. On my ballot, you could fill something in to just vote down the party line, but I didn't. So that I could vote green for State Treasurer and Coroner (apparently an elected position here?)

I love the midwest. There's something so tangible about the struggle here. There are these long-standing concepts of rightness that were born on the farm and have burrowed themselves into the minds of people-- on the farm, in the coffeeshop, in the grocery store...
I think the other source of my fuzzy feeling about Wisconsin is that I've allowed myself to feel cautiously optimistic. Not the kind of full-blown hopeful that will lead to me spending the night sobbing uncontrollably listening to NPR a la 2004... but like some good things could happen.
I also made two good points in school today, which may have also contributed to my sense of freedom. One involved how the legal system is the institutionalization of what we as a society have deemed right and wrong, one big exercise dictating the arc the moral universe. Ensuring that as MLKJ said, it does indeed bend towards justice.**

And you don't get a lot more free than that.


**Note: I did not, actually, quote Martin Luther King Jr. in Civil Procedure this morning. This is an adaptation. If you must know, I quoted Justice Souter and Jonathan Harr.