I voted early, I voted for Obama, I'll tell you why.

I don't expect some of you will agree with my vote. I do, however, expect you to respect why I voted that way.

I was born in Memphis in 1956, grew up half-way in Mississippi, grew up the rest of the way in Louisiana, and matured in Montana. My grandmother lived in the Mississippi Delta back when Tunica was little more than a whistle stop on the way to Memphis. On her property lived a black couple named Hannah and Golie. My grandmother and my parents pronounced it "Goalie". It's very possible that his name was "Goldie" or something but had been distorted by Mississippi accents. For my purposes, he's Golie because that's how I learned his name as a tiny child.

Hannah and Golie took care of my grandmother, Mammy, and my grandfather, Pop. Hannah helped Mammy around the house, Golie helped with outside work. I remember Hannah always had a big hug waiting for me when my parents took us up to Mammy's house. I didn't see Golie as much when we visited as I saw Hannah, but he was an important presence because Mammy could hardly carry on a conversation without mentioning something that Golie had built, repaired, needed to fix or would be called on to help with, especially after Pop died. When Mammy walked in as her home was being burglarized by a young black man and was knocked unconscious, it was Golie who found her. He and Hannah got her to a hospital and called us. They shared our worry. I cannot remember my grandmother's wonderful old house and it's magical yard without remembering Hannah and Golie.

I attended Sykes Elementary School during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We had fire drills, we had tornado drills and we had bomb drills. Fire drills, we were sent outside in lines. Tornado drills we crouched in the halls next to the walls. Bomb drills we curled up in tight balls under our desks. Another bomb drill was that we had to walk home from school one day in case of a missile attack. I was terrified. My mother met me about 6 blocks from school. She said if there ever was a missile attack she'd make it that far even if she had to crawl over rubble. We actually got a light snow that year in Jackson, but we were warned not to eat any of it because of fallout danger. Is it any wonder that I don't remember blue sky in my childhood? My memories all seem like every day was overcast and grey.

I was taken out of Sykes Elementary after 2nd grade when my mother started a school called Southside Academy. Southside was a private school located in the Sunday School rooms of, what was then, Alta Woods Presbyterian church. The year was 1964 and Civil Rights violence was high in Mississippi. My mother and father were politically active in the Rubel Phillips campaign. I had no idea why my mother started this school or why my parents were so totally passionate about Rubel Phillips or Barry Goldwater. I only knew that I enjoyed the school, the occasional news reporters at the house were exciting and, later, the cases upon cases of "Gold Water" stored in the laundry room tasted great. I didn't realize that all of these things had to do with denying people like Hannah and Golie their civil rights. Rubel Phillips campaign slogan was K.O. the Kennedys. I remember John F. Kennedy's funeral procession on TV. Not a whole lot was said about it in my house.

Southside Academy didn't last and I was sent to Marshall for 5th and 6th grades. There were three teachers in each grade level there. In 5th grade every teacher was a woman and each of those women was her own special brand of bitch. Mrs. Henley was the worst of the three. She corrected my reading one day when I pronounced San Joaquin as San Wahkeen. She fussed at me and said it was pronounced San Joe-ah-kwin. My mother had to go speak to the principle.

My brothers attended Whitten Jr. High School (It's now Whitten Middle School). Their school projects were fascinating. They were learning Latin and building things in shop class. We knew the Art Teacher, Mr. Quinn, and if I had a love almost as great as the one I had for horses, it was for art. I'd looked forward to going to Whitten since I was 5 and was told "when you're a big girl you'll go there just like Robby and Mike". I finally got to Whitten, got into Mr. Quinn's art class, and a year later was taken out and sent to a private school outside town called Council McClure. I was told it was because black children were going to be coming to Whitten and it would be too dangerous there now. Council McClure's art class was mostly crafts and English was the only language taught. It is where I met my closest Mississippi childhood friend and I'm glad to say I'm still in contact with her.

Council McClure is also where I broke my hip when my friend and I were trying to catch a stray kitten. When I was in the hospital for surgery on my hip, my roommate was a black girl named Margie who had just been diagnosed with diabetes. When my mother couldn't be with me, Margie's mom would sit by my bed and watch over me just as she watched over Margie. She'd bathe my forehead with a cool wash cloth and Margie and I became friends. She was from Tougaloo Mississippi, home of Tougaloo College and center of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. I didn't know that at the time either. I only knew that I really liked Margie and her Mom. Margie and I wrote each other for several years, until my dad, who worked for Chevron, was transferred to New Orleans and we left Mississippi for Louisiana.

During the late 60's I watched the news and, thus, watched the footage from the Vietnam War. Back then we were allowed to see what happened in wars. We saw the mangled bodies. Most of us were utterly horrified by what we were seeing and the youth stood up, eventually MOST people stood up and said "Enough." Like most inconvenient truths, that's not remembered very well now. There'd be a lot more people standing up now if we were being allowed actual news and proof of the actual blood cost. Of course, that's why we're not allowed actual news and proof of the actual blood cost.

My mother was terrified of living in New Orleans so we bought property in what was then the only gated, exclusive, subdivision north of the lake. There was one way in, one way out, a sheriff's deputy at the gate, sheriff patrol 24 hours a day and 3 residents had to vouch for you in order to buy property there. This effectively prevented black families from residing there. I can hope that's changed by now. Most of the kids where I lived, went to the private schools in town. Most of the kids where I lived were pretty darned snooty to be honest, except for my two best friends. The town was small enough that it didn't think having a working train track running down the center of one of two main streets was anything unusual. It was southern enough that the black part of town was across those tracks.

The black part of town was poor enough that most of those houses were little more than large wooden boxes. It was still that way when I left in 1991, except that there were more businesses out on the highway. Even in 1992 there were not many good jobs offered to the black residents. Only city, Parish, State or Federal jobs were available to them and you can just imagine the competition for those jobs. In 1989 my office manager freely admitted she'd die before she hired a "niggeh" to work at our doctor's office.

My best friends did not go to my high school. I went to a public high school. I rode a school bus so many of the kids from the poor areas who went to my school didn't want to talk to me because I came from that ritzy subdivision. My two best friends went to the local Catholic girl's school. After we'd been best friends for 5 years, Zelda finally told me she was a lesbian. After a "wow. What did you just say? Are you sure? Okay that was dumb, of course you're sure." My attitude was "Well, okay. Fine by me." That's when she started taking me to the gay bars in New Orleans. That's when I started having a damned good time in life. I'd been so sheltered I didn't have a clue there were gay people. "Lesbo" and "Queer" were just nasty names the kids in school called people they didn't like. I didn't know what they meant. Also, back then, John Travolta hadn't ruined Disco yet. We were "Doing the Hustle" and dancing to "Lady Marmalade" under a disco ball LONG before Disco got perverted by the mainstream.

We'd go to the apartments of our gay friends and have too much to drink and then fight for space at the bathroom mirror before we'd all go out en masse to the gay bars. We'd jitterbug, bump and hustle the night away with the boys and laugh so hard we couldn't breathe. Back at an apartment on Esplanade we'd all sit around with drinks and watch movies, talk, gossip, and gripe about how hard it was to find a good man. They were beautiful, smart, funny, kind, wonderful young men and I loved them. Most of them are dead now. We lost them in the 80's to "that gay disease" that Reagan would never mention and didn't want to fund research on because it didn't affect good people.

It was in the 80's that I had my sons. They laugh and tell people that they were raised by lesbians because I had so many gay friends. My best friend and her partner treated the boys like royalty. At the time, my friend was singing in New Orleans with a band comprised of off duty musicians from the Marine Corps. The Marines were the "guys" in my sons lives. I laugh and tell people the boys were potty trained by the marines, which is exactly true. One show and tell from a Marine works much faster than 10,000 or so words from mom. When my mother died in 1983, if it had not been for gay friends, the Marine Corps, and a three month relationship with Jim Beam I don't know that I'd have survived. Even after I left ol' JB in the dust, the Marines and the gay friends kept my little family afloat by keeping me laughing, keeping me feeling loved and therefore, keeping me somewhat sane.

After the Marines, one by one, left the corps or took stations elsewhere, my friend took a singing partner named Daphne. Daphne's girlfriend was Becky and Beck was an absolute riotous good time. Back then, I had no clue that they'd both become such important figures in my life. I was busy working and raising the boys, Zel and Daph mostly sang in New Orleans, but would perform on my side of the lake once a month or so. If I could snag a very cheap babysitter, I'd go get toasted with Zelda's mom, listen to the beautiful combined voices of my friends and laugh until my stomach muscles were sore for days with Becky. Those once a month evenings were my only outlet for fun. This was the Reagan/"trickle down" era and the only thing trickling down on my head was watery and yellow colored. I worked to pay rent, pay utilities, buy food and pay daycare so that I could work to pay rent, utilities and buy food and pay daycare...

At the same time we had the beginnings of "family values", but as always, those "values" only extend to a certain style of family. Dan Quayle was at war with Murphy Brown. Women, after all this damned time, were expected to be married if they were raising children. I was a single parent. The divorce from the abusive, alcoholic ex-husband had given me my maiden name back, but I wasn't allowed by society to use that name, legal or not. Anyone that had any dealings with my children, from the school to their pediatrician, called me by their last name and Mrs. regardless of how many times I corrected them.

Another absurd myth was being spread back then too. The myth of The Welfare Queen. Supposedly they were everywhere. Black women, giving birth over and over again just to increase their welfare payments. I can tell you where that started because I was there. I was in Louisiana when Grand Dragon Duke and his followers started that myth and it spread through all the country's bigots like a brush fire fueled by santa ana wind. I'd had anywhere from 3 to 4 surgeries per decade after breaking my hip in the 60s. In the 80's I had the be all/end all of hip surgeries and I was out of work, so sick I could easily have died, could no where near pay my rent, bills and food, but I did get a small 400.00 per month from interest on some stocks after my mother died. That measly 400.00 per month kept me from being able to get Welfare.

I was in that welfare office on many occasions appealing, and never once did I see a "Welfare Queen". The people trying to get welfare were just like me. I couldn't work, I wasn't permanently disabled, I made too much money to be on Welfare. My rent alone was 400.00 per month and it's not like I was in a luxury apartment. I didn't even have central air conditioning. But that 400.00 per month kept me off food stamps, medicaid and welfare. If a struggling mother so much as went to work at McDonald's she'd lose her children's insurance, so why in the names of all the god's would she do that? No one was having more children just to get Welfare. NONE.

I finally did get back on my feet after that surgery. It took a couple of years, help from my dad, help from my friends, help from my aunt and my brother loaning me money to pay my electric bill because it always came due the week before my paycheck came so I'd have to get a loan from him until I could pay him back a week later. It's not about "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps", it's about someone at least tossing you a damned rope to pull yourself out of the hole.

In 1991 I sold most of what I owned, handed the Ryder Truck company $1250.00 and asked "How far will that get me from here?" I loaded the truck and the boys and I headed for Montana where I lived joyfully on an "Open" Reservation for 4 years. "Open" meant that the land had been set aside as a Reservation and 3 different tribes had been told to move there. When the white folks decided the indians weren't farming that land they'd so graciously given them, they changed the laws and started taking over big wads of that "unused" land. It was, of course, being used, just not in the manner those good town folks had in mind. Hunting and gathering isn't using the land. Of course, it's not using it up either.

On that reservation I was able to go to college and be taught by the best professors I've ever had the pleasure to sit in a class with. Salish Kootenai College was the small community college just a few blocks from my house. Through student loans, my small monthly interest check, a small grant, part time work as a peer tutor and lots of fishing, potato picking and abandoned orchard harvesting, we lived warmly and happily. I made more great friends and fabulous acquaintances. I found true spirituality in the natural beauty there and felt whole for the first time in my life.

I met my husband online while I lived in Montana. He lived here in Arizona and we would talk for hours on end. Literally. AT&T mourned when I moved to Arizona in 1995. We trucked along, building our life together. The boys grew up. It was my eldest son that woke us up on 9/11, sobbing into the phone, telling me to turn on the TV because something really bad was happening, planes were flying into buildings and no one really knew what was going on, but they thought we were being attacked.

We turned on the TV just in time to witness the second plane strike the towers. I wasn't even fully awake so it didn't dawn on me that there were passengers on the planes. I was horrified enough at the thought of the people in those buildings, but when my brain began to comprehend the full scope of what was happening and that there were innocent victims on those planes that had known for who knows how long what was about to happen, I nearly threw up. Who could be that cruel?! That inhumane?! My stomach churned as it had churned watching the footage of the atrocities in Vietnam.

I had not voted for George Bush. I voted for Al Gore and there is no doubt in my mind that he'd have been 20 times the President that G.W. has been. But in the days after 9/11, with my little hand-made memorial wreath on our front door and our flag flying, I was willing to follow our President, along with every other citizen in this country, to find the monsters that had done this heinous thing to those innocent people.

The President said it was Osama bin Laden. He said the Muslims hate us for our freedom. Of course, that wasn't true but I did not give a rat's ass what reason bin Laden had for doing this and I still don't. You have a gripe with the government, you take it up with the government, you don't kill innocent mothers and fathers and children and grandparents because of something their government did that they had no control over. You Just Don't.

So, we needed to go to war against the Taliban because they were harboring bin Laden. Fine. Get the bastard. But three months later, we corner the s.o.b. and then tell his sympathizers to go in and get him?? WTF? Of course, he "somehow escaped through the mountains". Three months after that, President Bush is relaxing with one elbow on his podium as he smiles and says "I just no longer think about bin Laden. He's just not that important to me". Well he was, and is, still important to me dammit.

That's when we suddenly were at war with "terror". We had a list we were told were an "Axis of Evil". Saddam Hussein was at the top of the list. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was ready to pounce. At the same time we're hearing this from the President, we're SEEING that Hussein is giving the U.N. inspectors "Unprecedented Access" to Iraq to search for these weapons. Even all of his private palaces were being searched. The French inspectors kept coming up empty. There were old rusted out buried missiles from decades before, but nothing that would pose a threat. But Bush kept shrieking "WMDs! WMDs!!" There were only 20% of us (myself, my boys, my husband and his family included in that percentage) yelling "WAIT WAIT please dear god let the inspectors do their jobs!!" But no. We forced the inspectors out of Iraq for their own safety and we went into "Shock and Awe" mode. Well. It was shocking.

90% of our news was and is, no better than what we were hearing from ol' Baghdad Bob who kept telling the Iraqi people "There are no American troops at the airport! There are no American tanks in Baghdad!" Just like the Mississippi newspapers in the 60s trying to tell the rest of the nation that black folks liked segregation, the majority of our news outlets tell us what our government wants us to believe just as the Iraqi state run media told it's citizens what it wanted them to believe. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, etc. are just little U.S. Bagdad Bobs, telling us what the corporate run republican powers want us to believe so that they can stay in power.

Muslims still hated us for our freedoms, therefore it was wholesale hate of Muslims. All Muslims. Wonderful peaceful Muslims, and wonderful peaceful people that idiots decided were Muslims, were being attacked all over the country. It was just like watching the attacks on blacks in the south in the 60s.

We briefly forgot to hate Muslims for a couple of years here recently because the people that were busily giving our jobs to workers in China, India, Indonesia and the Phillipines were telling us that Mexicans were taking them, so people got the excuse they'd been searching for to hate Mexicans and paid no attention to the magicians actually making the jobs disappear.

For the past 3 years Honeywell has been dumping employees all across the country. In Phoenix alone, about 6,000 families that relied on this corporation for their incomes have seen those incomes sent to India, Indonesia, Mexico, Germany and anywhere Honeywell can find tax breaks and cheap labor. Last year my husband became one of those casualties. Honeywell gets tax breaks, cheap labor and isn't forced to pay insurance for those employees. Therefore, it looks as if the company has made a profit, even though all it's done is cut costs. Profit made the stockholders happy. Nobody bailed us out. Nobody bailed out all the other families that Honeywell left with no income. What my husband got for his 27 years with the company was a heart attack two weeks after he was let go without severence pay, heart surgery, our 30K in savings wiped out by medical costs the COBRA didn't cover, and a huge monthly COBRA bill.

That is just one corporation, in one city. All of the major corporations that used to provide jobs for U.S. citizens are "offshoring" our jobs and getting paid by our government to do so. John McCain had Carly Fiorina stumping with him for a time. Said she would be one of his main economic advisors if he were elected. Do you know who she is? She's the woman who was fired from her CEO position for running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She's the woman that said no American has a god given right to a job. She was not talking about lazy people who lay about on the job and expect pay for nothing. She was talking about everyone. If you currently have a job where you do not have to deal with customers face to face, your job can be sent to another country now and more than likely will be within the next 5 to 10 years if someone doesn't give corporations more reasons to keep our jobs in the U.S. than abroad. McCain and his economic advisor think we should just suck that up.

So, for all the Hannahs and Golies, for the children who had nightmares about "The Bomb", for those whose lives were torn apart or disrupted by segregation and busing, for the friends who died of AIDS, for the single mothers who were treated like pariahs, for those fighting the cleaned up "White Rights" face of the same old vicious bigotry, for those that died on 9/11, for those that have been crippled and killed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, for those who have worked all their lives only to have their jobs sent to other countries, for those without insurance, for those that can't afford college and for those paying astronomical insurance costs for insurance that doesn't cover decent care, I cast my vote, with tears of hope, mourning and gratitude streaming down my cheeks. I cast my vote and then stared at my ballot while remembering all the people and events that have touched my life in the past 50 years. I cast my vote with immeasurable pride for "That one".