October 12th. Election Day.
Early voting in Chicago starts today. Well. Not really. You can do it, but only at three locations in the City.
Tomorrow I can vote at the local library. And I will.
As a young man I rarely voted. In those days, the voting age was 21. Lyndon Johnson taught me that voting for a person because they would do what they promised was a dumb idea. That was in 1964, before I was old enough to actually walk into a voting booth.
By 1968 the uselessness of voting became even more clear to me. The choices for president were Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. I may have been young and crazy. But I wasn’t stupid.
I voted in the streets.
I think the first election I actually voted in was the Chicago mayor’s race between Jane Byrne and Michael Bilandic after the death of Richard Daley the elder. The people of Chicago rose up