Help Make History: Vote Today!

Turnout in today's election is expected to hit record highs, so vote early! If you're not sure where to vote or who to vote for, visit Vote411. You can also find your polling place on Google Maps.

And if you haven't made up your mind on a Presidential candidate, we're big fans of this guy.

So now that you know who to vote for and how to find your polling place, I've taken away all your excuses for not voting. So you might as well go ahead and vote today!

Win a Free Audio Book!

In 2004, an essay I wrote was one of 50 published in a book called MoveOn's 50 Ways To Love Your Country: How To Find Your Political Voice And Become A Catalyst For Change. It's a pretty handy little book, with lots of fun ideas for getting involved no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.

This has been my closest brush with literary fame, so I like to bring it up as often as possible. I did so just today.

"Kelly, how do you type that e with an accent?"

"Gosh, that reminds me of that time I was typing an essay of mine, which was 1 of 50 selected from thousands to be published in a bestselling book. And did I ever tell you about how Al Gore—you know, the Nobel Peace Prize winner—also wrote a piece for that book?"

A couple months after the book came out, the publisher called to ask if I'd record my essay for the audio version. I don't particularly like my voice, but do you think I'd pass up an opportunity to wallow even deeper in my faux fame?

As payment for my oh-so-gifted voice work, the publisher sent me some of the audio books. Lots of them. They are currently sitting in a box in my home office. FOUR years later.

I'm sick of looking at that damn box. And they're certainly not doing any good for the world by sitting in my office not getting listened to by any living soul. So last week I was giving that box the hairy eyeball, and I said to myself, "Self, you should set those audio books free. And it will give you more opportunities to refer to your literary stardom, and that is always A Good Thing."

Just Get to the Free Stuff, Lady
If you want a free audio version of MoveOn's 50 Ways To Love Your Country, this is how you enter to win:

1. Submit a comment on this post.
2. In your comment, convince me that you're going to vote in the upcoming election.

Tell me where your polling place is—a church, a school, a grocery store? (You can look it up on Google Maps if you're not sure.) Tell me what kind of ballots your county uses. Tell me that it's your first time but for real, you promise you really are going to vote. I don't care what you do to convince me, just do it. Because if you're not going to vote, you obviously don't love your country so what good is this book gonna do you anyway?

I might give away 1 book, or I might give away 20. I don't know yet. So wow me with your comments!

The Fine Print

• US residents only, please.


• I'll randomly draw the winners on Saturday.


• I'll pay the shipping.

More Free Stuff
If you like this whole comment-and-enter-to-win gig, you'll want to check out Bloggy Giveaways for a list of oodles of giveaways going on this week.

Bake Sale

I was walking to a meeting today, and I passed by a sign that said "Dessert Sale." I love me a good dose of sugar, so I stopped to read the sign.

Turns out a group of employees were doing the bake sale to raise money. An employee's nephew was just born with a kidney condition that caused one kidney to fail. The other kidney might fail too, but the little boy's mother doesn't have health insurance and so can't afford the tests or procedures he needs.

Bake sales for health care. Cuz that makes sense.

Arundhati Roy says "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Well, she's not coming fast enough, dammit. I bet she wouldn't mind a little help getting where she's going.

So do me a favor—no, do that little boy a favor—and get thee to a voting booth on November 4th.

Blog Action Night

Today is Blog Action Day. Bloggers all around the world are talking about the issue of poverty. I fully intended to post this earlier today, but Abby was on a napping strike so that made it difficult to get my work done, let alone a blog post. Better late than never though, right?

When I first learned about Blog Action Day last week, I started thinking about how I could participate. What could I say about poverty?

I don't know anyone who's poor. I don't have any personal experience interacting with the poor on a regular basis. I drive by the panhandlers at Burnet & 183 every day, but I don't know them. And the only time I ever talk to them is on Christmas Day when we drive around handing out sacks of food and hot apple cider.

Seeing
One day while I was pregnant with Abby, I was sitting at the Burnet & 183 light. I usually try not to make eye contact with panhandlers, but on this particular day it was a woman who had the same body type as my sister. So I looked. I saw this woman. I saw her dirty clothes and holey shoes and her carrying her whole life in a backpack.

And Abby moved.

My daughter moved in my belly, and I realized that not long ago, this woman too had been in someone's belly.

She was a baby once.

Two Paths
This woman came into the world the same way I did, but she's on a street corner and I'm in a dependable car on my way to a job with health benefits and a 401(k) and stock options. How is it possible that we both started life in the same way, but she's begging strangers for money?

But wait. Did we start life in the same way? Was this woman born into a middle-class home in an affluent school district? Did her mother have a good-paying job, or did she have to work 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet? Was this woman born healthy? Did she always have access to healthy food growing up, or did she go to bed some nights with a grumbling stomach? And when she woke up to go to school in the morning, was her stomach still grumbling? Did she have to sit through a spelling test or a math drill and try to pretend her tiny little body wasn't screaming for nourishment?

What Abby Did
These are the questions that Abby made me think about. And I won't lie—I didn't like the feeling. I didn't like thinking about that woman as a baby, as a child. Because it made me care.

Who knows—maybe this woman didn't have a hard childhood. Maybe she caught a tough break as an adult. Or maybe she made some bad choices—drugs, alcohol, staying in an abusive relationship.

But it no longer matters to me why that woman was on the street corner. Even today, I can't shake the image of her as a tiny little baby with chubby little legs and a toothless grin. I can't see her as less than a person.

So Now What?
So if this woman is no longer invisible to me, if I can't look through her, what does that mean for me?

Look, I give money. I give time. Maybe not to this cause specifically, but how am I supposed to fit in yet another issue? My work-home-community balance has the structural integrity of a house of cards. Trying to add one more thing could very well bring it all crashing down.

But the only other option is to do nothing. Am I okay with that? Am I okay with ignoring those people in pain, in need—people who just need a helping hand to get back on their own two feet? People who were once babies like Abby?

And I decided: No, I am not okay with doing nothing. But my time is limited these days, so as soon as I click the publish button for this post, I will make a financial donation to an organization that works to end poverty.

If you'd like to learn more about what you can do, check out this list of 88 ways to do something about poverty. Some of them are silly, but at the very least they'll get you thinking about small ways you can contribute to ending poverty.

Review: The Audacity of Hope

Title: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Author: Barack Obama
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Senator Obama lays out his vision for the country and how we can begin to heal the wounds of partisanship to solve pressing problems like poverty, unemployment, lack of access to quality education, and a society that for all its "family values" rhetoric doesn't support families in meaningful ways.

Review: Before I go any further, I have a quick public service announcement: Regardless of which candidate strikes your fancy, don't forget to register to vote before your state's registration deadline. A country where half the citizens don't participate in the process of choosing its leader is not a healthy country!

With that said, I loved this book. It took a couple chapters to get to the juicy stuff of specific ideas for solutions to our nation's problems. But looking back on the beginning of the book, I realize how important it was for Obama to start off talking about values and the common threads that pull Americans together—no matter whether they consider themselves blue, red, purple, or indifferent to politics.

And if nothing else, reading this book cemented my resolve to not only vote for Obama but to donate to the campaign and volunteer for him as well. Obama is a leader who can find common ground and lead us toward solutions to the problems that are tearing us apart as a country.

Obama is by no means my political kindred spirit or anything. I will probably always be more progressive than any Presidential candidate with a real shot at the White House. But Obama shares the values I hold most dear. We feel the call to take care of our fellow humans when we can, and not just when we live in the same house or the same neighborhood. We try not to devolve into "us and them" when thinking and speaking about those who don't share our exact political views. We realize that luck plays a large part in providing the opportunities you have for a good education, a good job, and a healthy life.

I was lucky to have been born into a middle-class family who could afford to live in a neighborhood that had excellent schools. Not to mention I was born with white skin that sadly, makes a lot of things in this country more accessible. Did I work hard to achieve what I have in life—a loving husband, a healthy daughter, a great job, a beautiful home? Sure. But does that mean that someone who cleans homes like mine for a living and has three kids at home and another job at night and lives in a tiny apartment on the "wrong" side of town works any less hard than I do? I know in my bones they work harder, much harder. So why am I more deserving of the things I have? I'm not. Mainly, I'm lucky.

We are stronger as a nation—as a world—when we all have the opportunity to live a healthy, happy life. Obama recognizes that and has great ideas for providing that opportunity to more people, and that's a candidate I can get behind.

Finally, I'd like to share a few quotes that rang true to me:

• "...the Ownership Society doesn't even try to spread the risks and rewards of the new economy among all Americans. Instead, it simply magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today's winner-take-all economy. If you are healthy or wealthy or just plain lucky, then you will become more so. If you are poor or sick or catch a bad break, you will have nobody to look to for help. That's not a recipe for sustained economic growth or the maintenance of a strong American middle class. It's certainly not a recipe for social cohesion. It runs counter to those values that say we have a stake in each other's success. It's not who we are as a people."
  
  
• "So let's be clear. The rich in America have little to complain about. Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age. These trends were already at work throughout the nineties. Clinton's tax policies simply slowed them down a bit. Bush's tax cuts made them words.
  
  I point out these facts not—as Republican talking points would have it—to stir up class envy. I admire many Americans of great wealth and don't begrudge their success in the least. I know that many if not most have earned it through hard work, building businesses and creating jobs and providing value to their customers. I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring every American child has a chance for that same success. And perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents...: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.
  
  More than anything, it is that sense—that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together—that we can't afford to lose. As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain. ...we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We've lost that balance in Washington, I think. With all of us scrambling to raise money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we've come from, and to affirm our bonds with one another."
  
  
• On his daughter Sasha's birthday party, where she sat in the middle of a parachute: "On the count of three, Sasha was hoisted up into the air and back down again, then up for a second time, and then for a third. And each time she rose above the billowing sail, she laughed and laughed with a look of pure joy.
  
  I wonder if Sasha will remember that moment when she is grown. Probably not; it seems as if I can retrieve only the barest fragments of memory from when I was five. But I suspect that the happiness she felt on that parachute registers permanently in her; that such moments accumulate and embed themselves in a child's character, becoming a part of their soul. Sometimes, when I listen to [my wife] Michelle talk about her father, I hear the echo of such joy in her, the love and respect that [her father] Frasier Robinson earned not through fame or spectacular deeds but through small, daily, ordinary acts—a love he earned by being there. And I ask myself whether my daughters will be able to speak of me in that same way."

So if you like what you've read here, check out Obama's site and learn more about his vision for this country.