Voting - What is your excuse for NOT voting??? There isn't a good one!

I rec'd this in an email and felt that it should be shared:

Vote - It's an amazing right!

A piece of history we need to remember, or perhaps become aware of, told
in a brief and moving way. I never knew this anyway. This is the story
of our Grandmothers, and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years
ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to
the polls and vote. The women who made it so were innocent and
defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.

Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a
rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk
traffic'. They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above
her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for
air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against
an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought
Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits
describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming,
pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15,
1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their
food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the
leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a
chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until
she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was
smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why,
exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote
doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO 's new movie
'Iron Jawed Angels' starring Hilary Swank. It is a graphic depiction of
the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at thepolling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO
movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked
angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I
watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way
I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted
now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The
right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'

HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social
studies and government teachers would include the movie in their
curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women
gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are
not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock
therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a
psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be
permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor
refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her
crazy. The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often
mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard
for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic,republican or independent party - remember to vote. History is being made.