By Cass Irvin
Oct., 2024
I can’t sing and I can’t dance–but I can vote. (I can sing, actually, but I shouldn’t do it in public.) Voting has always been important to me; I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it is something I can do.
I have been voting since high school. Life was not very accessible back then. My classmates went downtown in big, yellow school buses to register to vote. Buses were not accessible so my mom drove me. I registered to vote at the same time as my classmates; I just didn’t arrive with them.
When I lived in my first apartment on Cherokee Road, my polling place was in the basement of the neighborhood branch library. The precinct captain was so anxious for me to vote that he came to my apartment and took me to the polls himself. The walk over was rough. I didn’t have a motorized wheelchair and there were no curb ramps so we stayed in the alley.
At the library the precinct captain and two other guys carried me in my wheelchair down the steps to my polling place. I did point out to them, halfway back up the stairs after I voted, “You know, it really shouldn’t be this hard to vote!”
Now voting is easy and disability folks believe voting is important. As Helen Keller once said, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”
Please vote.
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