Welcome to the Only Child Diaries podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life, that you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulting, while doing so with humor and light. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about voting. Today, I'm going to talk about voting and also I'm going to touch on, yes, politics.

When I was growing up, especially when I was in high school, there was a lot of discussion about turning 18 and being given the right to vote. And I'll tell you this myself and my close friends were excited about the possibility of turning 18 a right to vote for my president. So when I turned 18, I registered and then I went and I cast my vote at my first election polling place. Now, this would have been the presidential election in. I'm going to tell you the year, 1980. I'm not going to tell you who I cast my vote for, but I did vote in that election and I voted in almost every election, whether it's national or municipal, since that time. Again, I see it as an honor and a privilege to vote and also part of my civic duty. I'm also reminded that my fellow female sisters, my fellow female Americans, were not always given the right to vote, that we earned it through a struggle and a fight to gain the right to vote here in America, and so I vote proudly. I still get a chill every time I vote. I still feel that American sense of duty, and I hope that you in the United States feel the same way and actually, wherever you live, wherever you're a citizen, I hope that you are able to vote and take part in your country's political administration. I know that's not always the case for everyone.

Now, that being said, what I've noticed over the years and with the prevalence of cell phones and email since those early days, is that we're inundated with political messages. It's not just on the TV anymore, it's also phone calls, but now it's text messages and emails about trying to get support for candidates or measures or propositions before each election and this year is well, it's no different. Every day I'm getting several text messages asking for my support, asking for my donation, and to a certain extent, I'm happy to make a small donation, but I'm not what you would call a big donor. Recently we've had a lot of extraordinary expenses ourselves, so I'm happy to make a small donation here and there, but I'm not going to be put on any major donor lists, that's for sure. This week there's been some really extraordinary happenings in the national politics, if you will the national race for president here in the United States, and actually over the last couple weeks or the month or so, what with Donald Trump's assassination attempt, if that's what you want to call it Also Biden and Trump's debate and several different interviews.

I'm not going to share with you everything that I feel and think, because in the end, my thoughts don't necessarily matter. My thoughts don't necessarily matter. I will tell you that growing up, my dad was the more conservative in our family and my mom liked to take pleasure in saying that she was more liberal. Yes, my dad registered as a Republican and my mom registered as a Democrat, so they like to cancel each other out. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's the way it was. In her later years, my mom maybe because of the Parkinson's or maybe just because of her kind of odd personality never liked to publicly say and when I say, when I use the word publicly, what I mean is to her family she never liked to tell us who she was voting for or who she supported. But we got the impression that she was a little bit more slanted on the conservative side, a little bit more slanted on the Republican side, which was a surprise to me in some ways, but in other ways I guess it wasn't a surprise at all. I mean, she had aged considerably since those first days of being a registered Democrat and her views had changed, I guess, in a lot of ways, and she had different expectations. Different things were important to her. But I don't think that that means that everyone who is conservative is old, because I know that there's a lot of old people who are liberal. Anyway, nowadays I'll tell you that well, for many reasons I'm a liberal and I've been a liberal for many decades I more closely identify with the outlook and the ideals that the Democratic Party revolves around. Now you might say to yourself well, I'm going to stop listening right now because I don't support those views. I'll tell you that I do have several friends who are conservative and I do have several friends that I don't really know what their views are.

I often tell my husband that there's no two people in this world who have exactly the same views on everything. He and I don't have the same views on everything. I mean, we have pretty much the same views on a lot of things, but there's a few things here and there that we disagree on. But in this world hardly anyone is going to agree with you on everything, and that's important for many reasons, mostly that we try to get along with each other because In a way, we all want the same thing. We want a good life, we want to be happy and we want to be able to be as prosperous as we need to be.

I guess my views stem from the fact that I feel that all people should be considered equal. It's not just because I'm a woman, although probably that has something to do with it. I think men and women are equal, but I think all races are equal. I think, however you choose your partner in life, you should be equal. Whatever your religious views are, you should be equal, and whatever your religious views are, you should be equal, and whatever your views are on any of these things, you should be accepted for how you are. So I guess you can say I'm pretty open-minded. For this reason I consider myself a liberal.

Now, I'm not particularly religious. I know that there's been some discussion recently that a lot of churches have, I guess, guided their parishioners towards one candidate or another. I don't think that that's really fair. I don't think church and state should necessarily be combined, that religion should influence its congregation, its members, on how to vote, because politics is not about religion. Anyway, I digress. I think what's important in this message is that every person who's able to should have a voice, whatever that voice is.

I'm certainly not telling you how to vote. I'm just asking that you look at the facts, you look at what's important to you and your values and you vote accordingly. You look at what's important to you and your values and you vote accordingly. That you take the time to find out a little bit or a lot about who you're voting for. I've tried over the years to do some. I've done more thinking about the judges. If you voted once or twice or several times, you know that these elections come up and on the ballot there's judges, right. And who knows about the judges? Because there's very often no or very few ads for the judges. There's no information about them, but if you dig a little deeper, you'll find that there is some information about them, and these offices are very important because they make decisions about things that are important to us, cases that are important to us.

So voting isn't something that you should do haphazardly. Voting is something that happens after you've done some research and you've done some reading and maybe you've done some soul searching. It's okay to vote with your family and it's okay to vote with your family's ideals. If those are your ideals as well, it's okay to venture out on your own. You don't have to tell anybody how you vote. You don't have to explain to anybody why you vote. You can keep that all to yourself. But I would just encourage you to vote. Vote for yourself, vote to give yourself a voice.

I remember my boss, ruth, the one who died back in 2021. She was very politically minded. She did a lot of advocacy work on behalf of the homeless, but she did it all on a local level, and I asked her once who she was going to vote for for president, and I asked her some questions around the presidential election and she said well, you know, that's not really that important because none of the work that we do really is on the federal level. I mean, she meant dealing with the homeless people in Los Angeles County, but after a certain election, she started to care a lot more because she saw the changes that were being made that would negatively impact homeless people and very poor people, and she started to care. Even though you might think that these elections are not important and really don't have any influence on your life directly, they really do and they really can, and that's why it's important to look at the values of the people that you're going to vote for.

Lofty, heavy subjects, I know, but nevertheless important ones. I hope that you'll consider the upcoming election here if you're in America. We have about what? 100 days left and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The political ads, I mean, and also some of the discussions, but it's what a lot of people are talking about. Well, folks, that's all I've got for today. There's so much more to say. I could go on for hours, but I'll leave you with that. Next week, we'll tackle another topic together. I hope you'll join me. Please share it with a friend you think might like it as well. Visit my Instagram page Only Child Diaries or Facebook Only Child Diaries Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Tracy Wallace and these are the Only Child Diaries.