Dark Clouds, Lifting

When I was thirteen, the Boy Scouts in Nashville had a cool program called “Citizenship Day” sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

It was great fun. Each year one boy would be the ceremonial mayor for the day, another the police chief, and still others included judges and the superintendent of schools. You got to visit with your real-life counterpart, sit the chair, tour the office, meet the staff.

I was the Postmaster of Nashville.

Somewhere in the archives of the old Nashville Banner newspaper, there’s a page with a black-and-white photo from 1962 showing me with (the real) Nashville Postmaster Lewis E. Moore, sitting together at his desk smiling at a sheet of stamps. His desk was on the first floor of the old main post office, on Broadway, the building that houses the Frist Art Museum today.

I was in that same building just the other day. I’d gone there to mail my application for an absentee ballot. (Before the Frist opened, in 2001, Nashville’s main mail facility had been relocated near the airport, and a postal branch was installed in the ground floor at 901 Broadway.)

On this latest visit, I couldn’t help thinking how even the US Postal Service is now embroiled in an election-year scandal (congressional hearings and all that) questioning the integrity of voting by mail. The current issue: Has the Trump administration, for political advantage, tried to scuttle public confidence in how the mail works?

Not that it isn’t happening somewhere, but I saw no sign of that skullduggery on my quiet visit to the Broadway branch this month.

I wasn’t there more than ten minutes. You park at the curb, walk inside, and signs point you to the main counter. There, a properly masked postal worker noticed the official application envelope in my hand, and he silently pointed to a standard white mail bin sitting on the counter near his elbow.

I tossed in my envelope. Done.

I asked the postman what would happen to my envelope next. The Davidson County Election Commission, he said, sends a staff member to collect all the envelopes from the bin every day at 5:00 p.m.

Sure enough, my official ballot soon arrived in my mailbox at home, whereupon I marked my choices and mailed it back to them same day. (Last Friday, I checked online and confirmed it was received.)

Now, there may well be political shenanigans aplenty going on somewhere to undermine the mail and corrupt the 2020 election, though I feel it’s more likely to happen in the “battleground” states not Tennessee. In any case, the simple procedure I found at the Broadway station this month was actually comforting in the moment.

So was the masked man in the blue uniform. He is not a big-shot from Washington (where so little goes right these days) but a career mailman just doing his job. 

To my eye all this was encouraging, and hopeful – like all those photos we’re seeing since Wednesday of the long lines of early voters that began forming so quickly across America. Pictures not of self-important politicians but of their employers, of voters doing their own jobs, bravely turning out in spite of Covid. These are pictures of democracy in action.

We of course have no idea how all the early voters are choosing, but deep in my optimism for our country I sense a dark cloud lifting within myself, of the air around us clearing, dispersing the gloom. Like the sound of a strong horse gathering speed, I hear the pounding hoof-beats of a coming correction.

All this has brightened my own spirit. Maybe yours, too.

If you have not cast your own ballot, do it now. Just two weeks from Tuesday night, all the voting will be over and the counting will begin.

Do your part to put a period to mark the end of this strange time of national turmoil, and the rancor that has sat heavy upon us all for much too long and disturbed our peace.

© Keel Hunt, 2020