For Friends Back Home in Alabama, An Expectant Day

This article originally appeared on this site.

In keeping tabs on my friends and family back home in Alabama this week, I realized that the mood leading up to Tuesday’s special Senate election—the sense of anticipation, the feeling that this election had a vital weight—was similar to the one that took hold before Election Day last November, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump vied for the Presidency. Following along on Facebook, I watched as former classmates whose politics had previously been unknown to me revealed progressive leanings, and wrote of wanting to preserve “Alabama values,” which, to them, were very different from the ones espoused by Roy Moore. (“Alabamians value close families, an honest day’s work, and open hearts. We love fiercely, watch out for one another, build and nurture close-knit communities, and demonstrate dignity and respect,” one former classmate wrote. She hashtagged it #NoMoore.) I wondered how the people I knew fit would fit into the broader picture of people who voted today.

On Monday night, a childhood friend of mine in Alabama posed a question on Facebook: What would people tell a friend who was going to abstain from voting on Tuesday because he or she wanted to “stay out of it?” Several people responded immediately. In a race with stakes this high, there was no such thing as staying out of it, they said. The friend who stayed home would have no right to complain if Moore wound up winning, some commented. Others said that abstaining from voting would be an insult to the activists who, over the decades, had sacrificed their lives for voting rights in the state. Many of the people commenting, I noticed, were black: I hoped it was a sign of strong turnout to come. This morning, a friend of a friend posted that she was at the polls, excited to cast her ballot. She tagged fifty-six people.

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