Election day

I hope that you voted. From the looks of the national turnout, you probably did. Here in North Carolina about half of the registered voters have already voted. I took my daughter on the first day of early voting, and she filled in the circle next to the name of the candidate of our choice.

There are so many educational opportunities around an election like this. We were able to connect what we'd just done in the voting booth to a project my daughter was just completing for school about local history. Then, for weeks, we've followed polls online. She learned geography and demographics from extended conversations about the electoral map, and why certain states have the number of votes that they do. She learned about rhetoric (in the classic sense) and propaganda from listening to candidates talk and watching their advertisements. Politics is, really, knowledge and heart in action.

I ran across this H. G. Wells quotation the other day, written in 1920, which is appropriate especially for today:

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.