Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Vote suppressed in South Carolina (a dream)

This morning just before I woke up  I was dreaming Mary Lou and I were voting in a primary election. The vote was taking place while we were traveling through South Carolina at what seemed like a rest stop off the Interstate, which was confusing to me. I thought we should have been registered in Georgia.  Mary Lou, who seemed to know what was going on, apparently having voted, told me it was my turn, disappearing from the scene while I attempted to vote. I didn't know the drill but I was directed to a shelf with a row of machines that looked like old CRT terminals.

Someone told me to use machine C, the 3rd one in the row. It had a tiny keyboard and screen upon which a series of simple math questions appeared for me to answer.  I tried to comply but the keyboard was slow and my efforts to type produced incorrect figures, e.g., when I typed the answer to 1+12 =, 123 appeared. The question would disappear or change while I was trying to correct my answer. The maddening situation might have been something contrived for the old TV show Candid Camera. After I made several futile efforts to type the answers, a male technician stepped over ostensibly to assist me. The man made some comments about the situation but offered no useful help. I became thoroughly frustrated with the machine and the voting process and announced I was not going to waste any more time on it.  I walked out in a huff and began to look for the way back to the highway. Directly across from the polling place was a large, open athletic field with only a few scattered people.  I crossed the field to what appeared to be a rustic campus that might have been a well-kept summer camp set in some scenic hills. I thought about my girls being too old for camp as I admired the pleasant scene of the camp administrative building, several bunkhouses distributed along the camp road and the tall hills.

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