Political pundits are proclaiming that this is the most important election of our lifetime.  Every election has been important in my lifetime.  As a child of the ‘60s, as a kid, I heard the stories of Black people being killed because they wanted to vote or they in fact voted, and even White people helping Black people to vote were killed, threatened with violence, or beaten.  This is in my lifetime, not a distant, past America.  Today, the vote is as important as it was in 1964, 1920, and 1870. Maybe more so.  Long before Trump and his politics of fear and racism, the color red associated with today’s Republican Party was real blood, the blood of people, mostly Black people, who took seriously the Constitution and all that jazz about creating a perfect Union.  They knew – well, they hoped – that America could be better, that she didn’t have to succumb to fear of her own People, that voting booths did not have to be killing fields, but the avenues for civic engagement, for participatory “democracy.”  It wasn’t so long ago when I was a child watching a cartoon about classical democracy, about animals running for the highest elected office, “King of the Jungle.”  The cartoon stressed the importance of even one vote, dramatizing it by the election being a dead time, with one animal having not voted.  The two candidates canvassed the jungle to find him to convince it to vote for one or the other.  So vote.  Your vote does matter.  If it didn’t, then certain forces would not be trying to suppress or diminish it.