Home > A Challenge to American Women Who Are Not Voting On Nov 2nd
A Challenge to American Women Who Are Not Voting On Nov 2nd
by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 26 October 2004by Victoria Covell
This letter, right from the heart, is for the women who have decided not to vote on November 2nd. But I will not speak to why you won’t vote, but to why you will.
In these momentous times, I hear the voices of the individuals of my lineage...family members who 1765 in Boston, MA, organized and supported the Sons and Daughters of Liberty; firebrands of the American Revolution...urging me to make a stand for the three sisters of democracy: liberty, equality, and opportunity. The summit of democracy is reached when these three unite...and one of the lofty places where they do so is in when women cast a vote.
When you make the decision to vote, you personally turn the great gears of society, however slowly, into inevitable change. When you vote, you not only move into the circle of democracy, you bring everyone of us with you to help strengthen it. Each and every vote not only matters, but is imperative, to keep our democracy alive in the 21st century. And only you can do this. Only you, taking up heart and conscience can keep our nation vital and on track with the original intentions of the founders. If you cannot come to a decision in your mind, vote with woman’s best resource: heart. Heart is a power bigger than any single human life. A heart full of love lives long past its owner, extending its realm well beyond a personal story. Acts initiated by a heart of love effect the world generations deep.
When you do not vote, the voices of the Daughters of Liberty: Abigail Adams, Mercy Warren Otis, Deborah Sampson, and Mary Ludwig Hays are silenced in the dust of history. But when you vote you not only regenerate the brave efforts of these American heroines, but awaken us all into conscience. If you choose not to use your vote as a way to voice your politics, use it instead to enliven your dreams and uplift your ideals! And if you are saying to yourself that this is all just imagination, remember that change happens because someone first started by imagining the possibilities. It takes just one vote for you to help turn impossibility into possibility. Dare to imagine! Dare to vote your heart, vote your conscience, vote your hope!
American woman: I challenge you to make your voice heard on November 2nd and vote. Do not allow your voice to be silenced and “disappeared,” for when even one woman refuses to participate in her right of citizenship, it diminishes all women. And yet, when one woman takes an evolutionary step of social action, it inspires all women into dreaming. There is no greater power on Earth that the 21st century woman may possess than living an idea whose time has come. The time has come for women to fully and equally participate in every social endeavor. By committing to vote, you stand up for your right to do so, a privilege grievously earned on the backs of all the courageous women of earlier centuries. Our democracy, established through the blood and tears of every race and generation of American women who have ever dared to achieve, is now watching us to see what we, the women of the 21st century will do with our precious opportunity. The torch of equality has now been handed off to us, yet when it’s our generation’s turn to pass it, will we hand it off lit?
While the vote of one woman may seem insignificant to you, never underestimate the power of one individual who, pushing past the barriers of her despair and crossing the line of apathy, dares to make a difference. On November 2nd only you can bring your despairing heart, your largest hopes, and your brilliant intentions to the human collective and change the American community. If each woman, from within her own unique field of endeavor, will throw just one pebble of heart, word, or active intention (such as one vote) into her community, together we will inspire vast healing circles of transformation throughout the global pond. These circles, when hitting the edge of the human heart, bounce off and return, meeting, effecting and being effected by every other outgoing circle. It is where these circles meet and intersect, that small waves of change rise up, and it is on these very crests that evolution occurs.
When woman moves one small principle of equality out into her local community, she will affect the lives of women-who she will never know-far, far away, across the globe. It will not be governments, corporations or vast armies that will change the world. It will be the people themselves who, refusing to relinquish their true humanity, now step forward to irrevocably revive it. The leaders of conscience that we have been so desperately yearning for, turn out to be our very selves! Women of America, in honor of the revolutionary rebels of my lineage, I hereby raise the call to arms! Let us, the daughters, actively fill them with the embrace of conscience.
There is a powerful wind of change, an evolutionary force, blowing over and coursing through, not just our nation, but all nations of Earth. Modern women everywhere are now rising up to meet it. Soaring on the flowing currents of the heart, I challenge you to meet me in this evolutionary force. I challenge you to vote on November 2nd and give your life its dignity while changing our country’s destiny. For that which you do not do, may be the undoing of us all. But I promise you, that which you do, however doubting, however despairing, however unseen...will be our collective evolution.
Victoria Covell is the author of the nationally award winning “Spirit Animals”; her newest book, recently released, is “The Evolutionary Woman of the 21st Century”.