10/24/08: We, and the laundry, can wait for a leader

This election season, my dishes have been piling up. My television has also been sitting dark, its about-to-be-useless antenna perched on top at an angle that makes it look forlorn; the laundry hamper, on the other hand, gets larger and less lonely by the day.

I’ve been ignoring them for the better part of a month in an attempt to learn as much as possible about our presidential candidates.

I’ve watched all three debates, of course, and spent every free night at virtual Town Hall chatting about polls and looking at graphs and Web sites.

I paused for a moment this afternoon to talk to my grandma, who declared herself — unprovoked by me — more interested in this campaign than any she could remember. She said, with an enthusiasm I found familiar, and a bit of incredulity, that she couldn’t even be sure who she was going to vote for.

I should probably look into renting a dishwasher.

It’s not much longer that I’ll be ignoring chores for election research, though, and my grandma will have to decide who her candidate will be in less than two weeks.

Whoever wins then will have a tough job, but it will be his. We’ll keep up our enthusiasm for the issues that most affect or impress us, but we’ll all go back to washing dishes and clothes and probably to watching sitcoms and prime-time dramas rather than debates, and Barack Obama and John McCain will get on with the jobs we’ve elected them to, one as president and the other as senator.

That’s pretty much how it should be, I figure.

We choose who will have the specific responsibilities of commanding the military, approving laws and signing presidential fitness awards; we don’t do these things ourselves.

I sat in a room with U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy from the 5th District two weeks ago, after he’d ridden a local bus to show support for the updates needed to accommodate riders with disabilities. He talked about sitting in front of the Stop & Shop on West Main Street in New Britain to speak with voters about the bailout when that vote was first brought before the House last month, and the responses he got, in person and in calls to his offices.

I had almost asked him at the beginning of the meeting whether he’d gotten my letter two years ago agreeing with his stance on Iraq. I would have meant it as a joke, knowing he was too busy to open and read all of his own mail.

By the end of the meeting, I would not have been surprised if he had read and remembered it.

"Oh, you’re that Alicia," he might have said, and I would have felt my face go "aw, shucks" red.

So here’s my take on a Connecticut constitutional convention: We elect our leaders to lead. And if our federal representative is accessible to us, so are our state representatives — even more so. When we don’t like what they’re doing, we write, call or protest to show it.

We don’t need a convention or a ballot initiative allowing us to vote on every issue. We can apply our enthusiasm to electing the right people into office, and once we’ve voted them in, we can tell our representatives, town council to president of the United States, what we think, and how we’d like them to vote, anytime.

The rest of the time, we’re free to attend to our own responsibilities.

Like doing the dishes.