Voting Beats Indifference Every Time

ZEPHYRHILLS - As illuminating juxtapositions go, this one was hard to miss. Inside the Alice Hall Community Center, nerve center for the city of pure water's election day activities, the action was as cool as the refrigerated air. Fewer than 100 yards away, lifelong friends lounged in the steamy shade cast by a blue awning while tots splashed in water park spray, both generations utterly indifferent to the day's electoral possibilities or implications.

Where it ought to have been hot, and where it was hot already, icy conditions prevailed.

Don't blame the elections supervisor. Despite the demise of touch-screen voting, fear-mongered into retirement, the process of casting a ballot was efficient, the poll workers inexhaustibly courteous.

Blame instead, if blame there be, the combination of candidates who fail to connect and a large and apparently growing subset of voting-age citizens who actively resist connecting.

Wanted: Honesty And Compassion

Consider Adel Brasch, 25, Zephyrhills High Class of 2001, wife of a Pasco parks and recreation worker. As the spouse of a public employee whose household well-being relies at least in part in the self-interested support and selection of elected officials, conventional wisdom suggests Brasch would have been at the polls when they opened, accompanied by a dozen of her like-thinking closest friends.

Instead, Brasch pronounced the whole affair not worth her trouble. "The whole bunch of them are liars," she declared. "They all say what the public wants them to say to get elected. And they're just lying."

As far as lifelong friend Jennifer LeHeup (of the LeHeup Hill LeHeups), also 25, is concerned, the list of elected ones who "just don't care" is as long as her arm, printed in tiny type. Beginning with Sheriff Bob White and extending to the fellow running for president who says he'll bring the troops home.

White, she says, runs an indifferent shop, especially regarding the residents of the county jail system, and if the guy who says he'll bring the troops home gets elected, "He'll find a reason to change his mind."

They are joined at some point by Clairessa Clinton, 22. The mother of two, including 3-week-old Aiden, resplendent in a blue romper, Clinton is a resolute nonvoter.

"I have no business voting if I don't understand it," she says, "and I don't understand it. I don't get politics. I've tried, but I just don't get it."

Gauging The Arousal Factor

On the threshold of a campaign season certain to match 1968 for compelling story lines, bared knuckles and post-election stakes, it is difficult to decide which side to lament over more vigorously: the aggressively soured or the irretrievably disengaged.

Advised at midday Tuesday that if they were serious about their bad opinion of the sheriff and they were registered Republicans, Brasch and LeHeup could make their complaints official, their ears pricked.

"I'm a registered Republican," LeHeup said. "There's still time?"

Indeed there was. Now, this was completed before Tuesday's polls closed. But if you awakened to the GOP primary for sheriff having been settled in Robert Sullivan's favor by a vote or two - well, two angry citizens will have learned, fibbed to or not, every voter counts.