Vote!

Credit:  http://www.authentichistory.com/1865-1897/1-reconstruction/1-johnson/18671116_Harpers_Weekly-The_First_Vote-Waud.jpg

I want to take you back a few years, to Harper's Weekly, around the year 1867.  See those men in the front cover drawing? They're voting.  Something so simple, yet so sublime.  Just two years earlier, the African-American men and women were nothing.  Less than nothing, really.  They were chattel. Slaves. Three-fifth of a human being, with the master calling the shots.  Slaveowners - and hopeful slaveowners - called them vicious slurs such as niggers and pickaninnies.  For a few brief years though, they called the shots.

A little less than twenty years before, the first women's rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention, was held in that town.  It took over seventy years until the final nail was put into that shameful past.  

Unfortunately, the South did rise again.  It wasn't until the protests widened and Martin Luther King Jr. began his preaching and marching (to be fair, among many others) that the South truly began to erode.  Amazingly (and so, so sadly) there are pockets that still try to keep African Americans out of the voting booth.

This is freakin' 2015!!!

As a transgender woman, I find it absolutely maddening that there are transgender people who won't vote.

Here's the question - in your life, who will call the shots?