Today is Super Duper Fat Tuesday, so if you live in one of the 20+ states holding primaries or caucuses today, you should go vote. If not, well, it’s still Fat Tuesday. So find a pancake supper or some paczkis and live it up. (Like many of our holidays, we’ve completely lost the meaning of Fat Tuesday and its connection with Lent–i.e., using up all the remaining sweets/eggs/fruit in the house in preparation for fasting during Lent. Instead we just retain the fun part and forget about the sacrifice part. Of course, this is all from a former Baptist who knows nothing about this sort of thing.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, politics.

Seth Godin had an interesting riff on voting and pointed out that nobody has voting parties. I think that’s kind of sad. We should march down to the polling place and vote together (something else that happens rarely, as Godin points out) and then go somewhere and celebrate our right to vote. If you don’t have an ‘I voted’ sticker or someone to vouch for you, you can’t get in.

And I’m not talking about joining up with a bunch of like-minded people and cheering for your guy. I don’t want to sit around with a bunch of people who voted the way I did. I don’t care about that. I want to sit around with a bunch of Americans and celebrate our democracy. Certainly we all want our guy to win, but let’s just be happy we had a voice. That sounds like a lot of fun. A lot of geeky fun, but still fun.

This is an amazing time to vote. Young people are turning out like never before. People are realizing these church-going evangelicals actually vote. And it makes every other group realize, hey, I’m a group like them. Heck, come November it’s going to be the first time ever that one of the major parties puts a black man or a woman on the presidential ballot. Whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or something else, that’s pretty cool. Whether you want the woman or the black man on the ballot, history is happening. And I want to be a part of it.

So come November 4, 2008, let’s have a party.