Bauer is irate. Her mother, Debie Bauer (see below), had told me that neither of her children was registered to vote. “I’m very political,” she insists. A senior majoring in history, Bauer is certain her vote means something – even in the face of the electoral college – but that’s just one of her concerns.

I’m just a firm believer in, like, one person makes a difference. Not so much with the electoral college. But until that system goes away, I still do think that, yes, it is making somewhat of a difference. The electoral college is like an all-or-nothing system, which is ridiculous. And that’s why people think their votes are wasted. It does away with all the other choices, and at some point you have to pick the lesser of two evils. You don’t get to vote for who you want to. So many people wanted to vote for Nader (in 2000), but they thought, ‘What’s the point? My vote’s going to be wasted because it’s not going to count for anything.’ Like, it was an ‘I-want-Nader-but-I-definitely-don’t-want-Bush-so-I guess-I’m-going-to-have-to-vote-for-Gore’ type of situation.

Health insurance isn’t just an elderly issue. I don’t have health insurance, and I have prescriptions that I have to fill. My prescriptions cost me $126 a month, out of pocket, and nobody’s talking about that. They’re talking about children and elderly, but what about the 20-somes who don’t work a 40-hour-a-week job? Or who work two jobs part time and can’t get health insurance? And the jobs that are being created are all minimum-wage jobs that don’t pay you enough. Like, how do you live off of that?

Especially with me graduating from college in three months, where am I going to work? I’m going to have a history degree with a minor in soc, which is something to me but it’s nothing to employers. They’re like, ‘Oh, you graduated. OK, great. You can sit at a desk.’ So I feel like my history doesn’t mean anything unless I go to grad school, and who has money for that? Even being young, social security and Medicare is a big issue. Because the way things are going, there won’t be any Social Security for me. It will be gone by the time I am ready to use it.

And as a woman, my body, the right to decide what I’m going to do and not have somebody decide for me. That’s a huge one. And I think it’s gotten sidestepped a lot in this election.

Dr. Lavis was 23 when she began practicing chiropractic. “I was at the time, the youngest person to hold my degree,” she says. “But not anymore.” It wasn’t easy, she adds, for her to complete the course of study. “Everybody told me that I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Why didn’t I just get married and have kids?”

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an oncologist. And when I was about 15, my mother worked as a med-tech for some oncologists, and they let me work with them. It started out that they just let me clean up and hang out and listen to things, and I would assist them with bone marrows. I really got to see what an ugly thing it was.

At the same time, I was working in a print shop doing cleanup. And the ink had lead in it. So I got lead poisoning, because I did it with bare hands. I got really sick, and what you get is a lot of back pain, muscle pain. My grandma took me to a chiropractor, and I just thought it was the greatest thing on Earth. It made me feel so much better. And I didn’t like him at all. It’s more impressive when it’s someone you don’t like, because obviously there’s no placebo effect. It’s not because it was a really cool experience. Something about the adjustment did something to me that was profound.

The biggest concern I have is probably the environment. But certainly Iraq has everyone’s attention right now, and the biggest change I’ve seen in my practice has to do with the welfare changes. Some people who were on that now aren’t and have ended up in mental institutions. Maybe it’s because they were barely functioning, even given all the help they have. And you can’t just take some of that help away, and say, “Now go get a job.” The ones I’ve experienced really have tried, but it was more than they could handle and it just caused a meltdown, if you will.

I’m always concerned about doing less in the environment, polluting less and cutting down less and all those things that Bush in particular seems to think are just fine to do. Like he thinks that wild salmon and farm salmon are the same thing, so you should not worry about the salmon species anymore. And how wild can you get? It’s such a bad thing to expose wild salmon to farm salmon. They have their own set of bacteria and ecology because they’re raised so close together and they live on antibiotics. So they tend to be bigger and stronger, but they don’t last as well, especially out in the wild. They then give wild salmon diseases, and if they manage to mate they pass on damaged DNA. There’s been research done that the risk of cancer is higher if you eat farmed salmon. There are so many things wrong with the way that they’re being raised.

I think I’m always optimistic, but I don’t like the way things are going. And I think if they keep going that way, there’s going to be irreversible damage done.

Held says he “was fourth of eight kids of Ruben and Mary Held of Menomonee Falls, Wis. My dad drove a truck, and my mom worked at home from 5 in the morning until it was over. The idea that you worked hard so that you might be able to pass on a better deal for your kids is sort of a foundation of American democracy, and that was just the way it went around us as I was growing up.”

My mom was very much involved in making sure that we had a place in the moral world. I remember during the civil rights riots, especially 1967, sitting on the couch with my mom watching television and having her point out that when the policemen were turning fire hoses on the demonstrators and turning dogs on black people that, “That is wrong. What the policemen are doing is wrong.” That’s a pretty complicated moral equation to throw at a 9-year-old, you know? But I think it helped me form a view of the world that was a little bit larger than it might otherwise have been.

My dad worked six days a week. He was supposed to have a job until he retired. That was the way it was. He was surrounded by 60- to 80-year-old guys who came to work every day for because they were guaranteed employment. Even when they were no longer that useful they were kept on the payroll and were given something to do.

I don’t see that America around anymore, that middle-class America of working people who have jobs that they can count on, employers who’ll have long-term commitments to their employees – and back. My dad was thrown out in the early ’80s in the kind of dissolving that has gone out throughout the country in all the major industries, especially what we used to call the Rust Belt. It’s very rare now that there’s a connection between employer and employee goes beyond the immediate dollar, and that has serious consequences for us as a society.

I think the issue of finding meaningful work in changing times is probably the most important issue in America today. I look at the number of people here in Spokane who don’t have work, and I know what it feels like to be out of work, to have no sense of yourself as a worker, especially in America, where who you are is what you do. When you introduce yourself to a stranger at a party, do you say, “Hi, I’m Dennis, I like the paintings of Kandinsky”? No, you say, “I’m an editor. I work at schmoe’s.”

Since the beginning of time, what makes us human beings is the need to make, to create, to modify our environments, to hopefully make things easier for ourselves. We used to do that inside communities. Some of those were family communities, some of them were work communities. We know that the family community is dissolving, and we know some of the effects that has had on individuals. I don’t think we think much about the work community’s dissolving and people not having that sense of a place to go.

Community is efficient. We forget that. The reason why we have one guy who knows how to do the brakes on cars is that way we don’t all have to learn that, you know? And the further flung we get in our relationships, and the more tenuous we get in our relationships, the more apt our society is to fall apart.

I think we’re in late empire. Look at it historically: We’re not the first people who have been in this position. We have power that come from resources that we’ve squandered, and the bill is about to come due. We are entertaining ourselves to death, that’s what Neal Postman says. It’s so obvious. There’s so much sleight of hand going on that the facts of our lives are being torn away from us.

Cranford describes himself as “sort of professionally dormant for the last couple of years, taking care of a wife, three cars, two cats, no kids.”

I had just turned 18, literally, and was pretty fired up, got registered and thought, “This is great. I get to take part in the power of voting.”

I think my vote makes a difference. At local levels I think it makes a huge difference, and on the national level you’ve got to go through the motions. I’m gonna do it and I’m gonna try to get others to do it. I’m my own lobby of one.

The world’s getting small. Larger population is a huge concern that nobody ever talks about, or it’s dismissed lightly and I don’t think you can dismiss population. Let’s limit some population. Let’s make the United States more willing to fund sex education, not only in this country but also globally. Especially in third-world cultures that are exploding, we don’t do all that we could do, and I think it’s more from a moralistic base, which I don’t agree with. I think you give people the information and give them the means to limit their own population. When people limit their populations, they limit their problems. It seems pretty simple sometimes to me.

I’m more disappointed in the electorate than I am in the politicians. Politicians are politicians. Most of them are professional, most of them will say and do anything to retain their power, retain their job and get more power. But the electorate has completely eaten it up. And maybe it’s because we’re so polarized.

I don’t know where it’s going to lead. But it doesn’t feel good at all. I don’t recognize this country half the time, and that’s discouraging. And that makes me very angry, and I find myself wanting to cancel cable (TV) because all these talking heads will just say anything, they’ll put anyone on who will say anything. It’s really just marketing, which makes the world go around, unfortunately.

I love this country. I truly, truly do, and I’ve been around the world. But America frustrates me now because I don’t think that we’re living remotely close to our ideal, which is paraded out there by the conservative administration as you’re not a patriot if you’re not for the war. And that goes against everything I’ve ever read about true patriotism in this country. I don’t recognize a country in which educated dissent is heaped shame upon.

Bauer (and, yes, her first name is spelled with a single "b") is a single mother with two grown children who has been working for credit unions since she was 21. She just missed voting in the 1972 election. “It was Nixon and McGovern,” she says, “and I was one of only a couple of people who would have voted for McGovern if I could have voted. But I was only 17.”

I vote religiously, always have. But you know, my kids do not vote, and it’s a bone of contention between us. My daughter is a registered voter, and she does vote but not as religiously as I do. And I don’t believe that my son is registered.

It’s fabulous to see how many elections actually come down to being just 100 votes or 50 votes or whatever. So every vote really counts. But whether it counts or not, I’ve expressed what I want to express and I’ve voted the way that I feel. If everyone thought that it didn’t count, then nobody would vote. And so you have to think that it makes a difference. Because one becomes two becomes three becomes four.

We’re at a very strange point in our history. I think we are, when you look at us, a nation that is fully polarized. We’re 50 percent Republican, 50 percent Democrat when you look at who controls the House, who controls the Senate. I think what’s scary about that is that it really isn’t a 50-50 split. It’s 50 percent vs. 50 percent of people who are taking a stance. There are a lot of people in between those two groups, and those are the people who can make a difference. Those are the people who should be standing up and who should be going to vote on Nov. 2nd.

The people on the far right scare me because they’ve lost touch with mainstream America, with the majority of the people. I think people on the far left also want to see it one way. Because you’ll hear people talk about government conspiracies, that we never landed on the moon and on and on. And I think of Americans as being more in between those two extremes. But those people don’t stand up, and so they aren’t heard. And those people need to be heard.

We’ve failed, as parents. I’ve failed. Here I am, a very strong political person who feels voting is very, very important and you do it no matter what. If there’s one referendum on the ballot I stop and make sure that I have time to vote. But I’ve failed because I have not put that sense of urgency or importance in my children. And if I haven’t, then someone who doesn’t care at all is never going to. I’m leaving here and grabbing my children and taking them down to the voting booth and telling them, “You will vote!”

Born in West Point, Miss., Wilkerson graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in 1973. She is the mother of two.

In 1962, my mom was looking for a better life for her children. And she had a friend here in Spokane who was a black hairdresser. And when this lady came back to West Point to visit, she talked my mom into coming out here and work in her shop. So my mom loaded us up on the train, and away we went. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I have what’s called a congregate care facility. I care for people who are developmentally disabled, most are dual-diagnosed with mental illness. The average age of my clients is mid-30s. They’re the ones who came out of Special Ed in high school, pretty high-functioning, just need a support system.

You know the first person I truly remember voting for is Bill Clinton. That was when I first got dialed in to how politics affects my life. It was driven by the population that I serve and who was talking about serving the disenfranchised. And that was the Democratic Party.

I’m sure that I’m a broken record, but speaking both personally and professionally, if the health care system isn’t redesigned, I just think that it’s all going to go under. It’s a class system. The next thing that is really challenging to me from a business perspective – I am a small-business owner – I’m just taxed to death. I don’t have enough money to hide it, you know, and not enough money to fight it. So, I’m just caught in the middle. And the middle is slowly disappearing. Some days, what I feel like is the working poor. Even though I have a measure of success by most people’s standards, I’m like the working poor.

My hope first of all is that we really become a united nation. I’m tired of the fractions being so splintered that we cannot come together and solve problems. I think we have the money, I think we have the brain power, I think we have the elbow grease to make it happen. We need to make the system more equitable. I know there are solutions out there, but people are so afraid to try, you know. It’s a “me” mentality. If you’ve got it, you certainly want to keep it. And it’s perfectly demonstrated in our community. Spokane has so much money it drives me nuts. I mean, there’s so much money here it scares me. We’ve got so many unmet social needs, and yet you can’t get people to give. On a good day.

What could we do? We could look at our whole support structure, social security, disability, the disenfranchised, all those people in that section. They don’t vote, they don’t pay taxes, I know. But they are a part of this country, and there is enough to go around.

A graduate of Gonzaga University with a degree in chemistry, Shiosaki was born in Hillyard in 1924. He and his wife Lily have been married for 49 years.

Both my mother and dad were born in Japan. My father immigrated for the first time in 1904. He came over as kind of an indentured laborer for the railroad. And slowly he just kind of migrated into Spokane.

When the war started, there was a huge hue and cry about the Japanese and Japanese-Americans. I didn’t graduate from high school until June of 1942, and I didn’t turn 18 until the end of August. I registered for the draft and I discovered that my draft classification was 4C, enemy alien. So I wasn’t eligible to be drafted. Well, what could you do? There were so many regulatory restrictions against Japanese-Americans – we couldn’t travel more than 10 miles away without a permit, and we had to be in before 9 o’clock at night, and on and on. It was not as bad as those people who were evacuated and put in camps, but it was really cumbersome.

In the early spring of 1943, there was an announcement that they were taking Japanese-Americans who wished to volunteer. It turned out to be an all-Japanese-American infantry combat team (the 442nd.) We actually fought in Italy and in France. We were in harm’s way for about a year, from June of ’44 until May of ’45. I was discharged the 6th of January, 1946. You notice how easily I can remember that date. I was a civilian at heart all that time.

I have voted ever since Harry Truman, I think. I think my vote makes a difference. One vote means there are other one votes out there, and collectively we do good. It represents something. And, of course, it’s precious to me.

When I got out of the army, got out of school, I had the hardest time getting a job. You know, the old prejudices were still there. And while some of those racial prejudices have changed, it hasn’t changed enough when you think about what happened to the Arabians or the Muslims in the past few years. I keep thinking we’re getting better, and I think to some extent we are, but we’re a hell of a long ways from being where we could be.

At my age, I really don’t have any great material wants. I’d like to have a new fly rod once in a while. I’d like for me and my wife to live comfortably until we die, I guess. For the country, I see this great antagonism. Political parties are at each other’s throat. They say bad things about each other. It’s really uncomfortable to hear and see this going on. Both parties are guilty of that. God, I wish we’d get over that. I wish we could get over that.

Before moving to Spokane a year ago with his wife, Lauretta, and two daughters, Anderson did “personal security” work in California. I’m just a barista now,” he says. “And I enjoy it. As compared to having someone’s life in my hands, this is great.”

My wife graduated from Gonzaga (in 1983) and was up here for a reunion last summer. And she came home with just a special kind of look on her face. And I asked her, “What’s going on?” And she said, “I’d forgotten how beautiful Spokane was.” I said, “Let’s move.” So we came up here like a week after that and stayed for four days, bought a house, went back to California, sold our house and were back in three weeks.

I’m glad for the opportunity for my girls to be up here. Things aren’t so materialistic. People are still human beings. You know, down there you come home, open your garage door with a remote, drive in, close the door behind you. If you waved to a neighbor on your way in, that was your personal contact.

My wife and I are watching the news the other morning, and they were talking about the assault weapons ban. And I started laughing because, as I was telling my wife, “They’re making it sound like these weapons have been nonexistent for 10 years.” But all of these weapons have been available, just in a different configuration. It’s not like they’re any less of them.

Like everything else, people are afraid of what they don’t know. And I think a lot of people, who don’t know both sides, are swayed by somebody who is articulate in how they speak their side of the story.

My wife and I, we laugh about a crime being called a “hate” crime. Like, anybody has ever been killed out of love. It’s just something more for an attorney and to help people feel good. Give it a label.

When I worked at a gun store, we had to go through all the background check information. And in California you had to wait 15 days to pick up your firearm. And people would say, “This is to keep the bad guys from getting guns.” Well, I’ve never known a criminal to use a legally owned firearm to commit a crime, you know. It’s just a law to keep good people in check.

Sarah Brady blames guns like people blame a pencil for a misspelled word.

Thomsen has owned and run Joe’s Coffee since 2000. He and his wife, Robin, are movie buffs, and his prize possession is a vintage 1962 Guild Starfire electric guitar.

I consider myself more of a barista than a baker. I enjoy baking, but what I consider myself really good at is pulling coffee. As far as my business goes, I’m probably 60 to 70 percent coffee, 30-40 percent pastries. But I’m no promotions genius.

Nine/11 caused a kind of a domino effect. The economy took a downturn, and it was caused by everything kind of coming to a screeching halt for three days. Basically, the way I figure it my business was just starting to take off at the beginning of September, 2001. Then things really just took a nose dive, and they’re just back to where I’m doing better than I was doing then. I’ve had very, very slow, steady growth, you know? I joke that just give me two or three more years and I’ll probably almost be making a living.

To be honest, I’m not really that fearful. And the reason that I’m not fearful is because while I have a feeling that conflicts will be on the rise, I feel like I live in a quiet corner of the world. I’d say my fears would be more long-term, in that if the United States keeps going in the direction that it’s going politically, you know, becoming more and more partisan, us and them, that eventually it will tear itself apart. But I don’t see that happening for a long time.

My hope is that the human race figures out that we’re all stuck on this same mud ball, and that it’s really not that big. Because if we keep mucking around we’re pretty much all doomed.

“Call me a college administrator – and wife,” Shiosaki says. She is married to the artist Charlie Schmidt, and the two have a 6-year-old daughter named Sydney. Shiosaki’s grandfather, Kisaburo Shiosaki, founded the Hillyard Laundry in 1917. It closed in 2002.

I don’t think that I’ve voted for a winner except for when (Bill) Clinton ran his second campaign. I voted for Mondale. Loser. I voted for Al Gore. Loser. I remember early during the Gulf War. It was over in 30 days or something, and his (George H.W. Bush) approval rating was really high. There was this scandal with Clinton. And then they let Ross Perot in, and Charlie convinced me to vote for him. Voted for a loser again.

But I think it’s important in a democracy that people understand that they have a vote and are able to cast it. Because not all people on the planet have that ability. One thing that I look at is that I’ve voted for all these losers, right? And our country is still the No. 1 superpower. People are employed, people have health care. We have sewers, we have roads, we have telephones, we have electricity. We have a standard of living in this country that is not surpassed by anybody.

Probably one of the things that I never used to think about was the environment, and now I realize why all these people used to protest about the ocean, the trees, the water. It started to make sense to me. When I was in my 20s, I remember somebody tried to sell me life insurance. Oh, right, that’s falling on deaf ears. “I don’t care that I can get it for a few dollars for the rest of my life. I don’t care.”

I hate to say, because I’m a parent now, but when the railroad wanted to put their refueling station on top of the aquifer in Rathdrum, I thought, that’s nuts. No double tank, no safeguard, no nothing? It’s going to be right on the Rathdrum prairie and right on top of all that water coming this way, toward the west? Wow.

We’re lucky in Spokane. There are a lot of brown lawns in Seattle. You know, Seattle, the emerald city? Well, that’s going to happen all across the country. And if we’re not cognizant of it now, the voters, we who have a voice now, our kids won’t have clean water or they’ll have very expensive water. And so will their children.

Born and raised in Spokane, Roth has lived in Spokane all his life – save the years he spent getting his law degree at the University of Washington. He and his wife Angela have no children.

I’m very interested in international affairs, particularly the Iraq War and what direction things need to go over there. And that’s much more true now than it was four years ago. The economy is obviously important to me – our domestic economy as well as how our economy interacts with the rest of the world. I don’t see it going in a very positive direction right now, and obviously that’s something that affects everyone.

I’ve been following the development of the gay-marriage ban issue pretty closely. I have fairly liberal opinions about that issue. And the Republican platform on that particular issue, even though it really doesn’t affect me personally, is a pretty big turn-off to me.

I don’t remember the first person I voted for. In 1992, my first presidential election, I remember that I voted for Bush senior. And if I were to go back before that, about ’90 or so, I probably voted for Tom Foley.

My vote may make a small difference overall, but after the 2000 presidential election, after watching just how close that came and all the finagling that came afterward, it kind of drove home how even though overall your vote may not change anything, it certainly does matter who you vote for. Or if you vote at all.

I think this is more true of the print and television media, but I think most of them make a very sincere effort to be balanced about reporting the news. Whether they succeed or not, I think the effort is there. And most of the reporting, I think, isn’t colored significantly by point of view or the other.

I guess just generally speaking I hope to live a full life, whatever that involves.

Jeanne Casstevens writes regency novels under her birth name, Jeanne Savery. She lives with her husband and various family members in a Spokane Valley home with "half a dozen phones," she says. "We're a three-generation family. There are five adults and one kid. I feel sorry for the kid."

I grew up with a father who was a hard-working farmer. The transistor radio hadn't come into being, and he was in the house for meals during the busy season. So for breakfast, you listened to the news, you listened to the weather, you listened to markets. At lunch, you listened to the news, you listened to the weather, you listened to markets. And at dinner, you listened to the news, you listened to the weather, you listened to markets. For my age, I was pretty well educated about what was going on in the world.

The world I lived in was a relatively simple place. The town I lived 7½ miles from had a sign that said a thousand people lived there. We used to laugh and say that included the cats and dogs.

I was married between my sophomore and junior years. We were at Reed College (in Portland) where things were pretty hectic. The Ivory Tower atmosphere was intense. The real world out there just disappeared for weeks at a time.

When we were in England the first time, we were a trifle scornful of some of the things that we saw. There were businesses that had been in business for decades, if not centuries, that had always done things a certain way and by god they weren't going to change. England had been a world-wide power for a very long time, but that had disappeared. And they weren't really willing to admit it. We, in this country, had something very similar. We had power, we had good things going, we were hard-working, we really were gang-busters. But the rest of the world is beginning to head off in its own directions, doing its own gang-buster thing, and frankly I don't think we're adjusting to that. I think we're greedy, I think we're power hungry and I'm a little frightened of the world that my grandchildren are growing up in.

After 20 years in the army, first as an enlisted man and then an officer, Steven Stuart works as a security guard as a Spokane hospital.

My vote makes a difference, sure. It just shows if nothing else that it’s your duty to vote. I spent 20 years protecting that so, yeah, you should go down and vote. If everybody felt as if their vote didn’t count, then no one would show up and you can’t complain about who gets elected. I’ve lived in Communist countries, or former Communist countries, and I’ve seen what that’s like, if you don’t take an interest in what’s going on.

I’m a fairly big conservative, so talk radio represents my point of view more than the mainstream media. So it’s being represented. You just have to go and look for it, just the same way that if you were liberal you’d have to go to other places to look for it.

I’ve got two families. I’ve got a grown set of kids, and then I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old. And what I want is that neither one of them to have to face some of the things that we’re facing no – the terrorism, the fears and stuff like that. We grew up with the Cold War. And actually I used to laugh about it because I never really thought about it. It was such an all-encompassing thing, you know. But nowadays it’s different. We never had to fear the things that we have to fear now.

I don’t want my daughters to have to go through those types of things. I don’t want to have to be afraid of living in a city, sleeping in a bathtub because of bullets flying through, like some places. I want them to have a good education, to get the good things. What I want to do is provide for them as much as I can.

Dr. Schaaf is married and the father of two boys, ages 7 and 3.

Why do I always vote? Well, I ask myself that question sometimes. I think it boils down to the notion that unless all the people like me vote then our views will never be represented. And if I don’t vote, then I think I’ve abdicated any right to bitch and moan about the process.

Health care matters a lot to me, and the disintegration of our current health-care system disturbs me a lot. I care about my family and the future of my kids, and therefore I want some level of peace and security. Plus a sustainable environment so that they’ll have something to enjoy when they’re my age.

I think the purpose of most media anymore is to entertain and sell advertising rather than truly inform the public. So there’s a lot of fluff, there’s a whole lot of style without substance. I read the newspaper every day, but I read it with a grain of salt.

I’m a Leadership Spokane grad, and part of that tells you, yeah, there is an importance to politics. And part of that importance is getting your own sorry ass involved.

My perception, and the common perception, is that the goal of most politicians is to get re-elected. And that even the folks who went into it in a good spirit in the beginning get co-opted pretty quickly by the process.

Apathy affects me by depressing the hell out of me. Because politics now seem to be run by single-issue interest groups, there isn’t a lot of thought that goes into it. So the laws that come out of that process tend to reflect extremes. Why can’t people who see the shades of gray be inspired to get involved?

Phoebe Hruska is an avid reader and the widow of a 24-year Kaiser employee. She has three children, seven grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

I voted against Franklin D. (Roosevelt). I voted for Wendell Wilkie. By then I was 24. I wasn’t quite old enough the time before.

I certainly do (think my vote makes a difference). I’m a little bit disturbed that so many of the young people today are so casual about it. They think it doesn’t make a difference. But it does. If none of us voted, then what would happen?

I would like there to be peace on Earth, but I know that there never will be. That’s just not in the scheme of things. I’m troubled by the war in Iraq. I will vote for Bush again, but I’m not happy with the election. And I’m not happy with what I’m hearing on television – the smears. I don’t think it’s any worse than usual, but I don’t like it.

When I was growing up, we weren’t as socialistic as we are now. People took care of themselves, or their families took care of them. Now there’s so much expectation that the government is going to do this and that or the other thing for us, and I don’t see any turning back from that.

I have always worked, but I have never worked for pay. I have been a mother and a grandmother and a wife.

Tom Connelly used to teach high school history, social studies, German and Spanish. For the past 15 years, the Washington native has made his living buying and selling books. Our conversation begins with a question: Are you registered to vote?

You bet I am. I'm registered to vote. I do vote. I think it's important.

I feel good because I feel that in this country the voices of the people are still listened to. It's important to be articulate about what your concerns are.

The opportunity to sell books is the opportunity to live and breathe and digest and discuss what's important to you every day. So I put my mind where my money is, and I put my money where my mind is: in education. I'm selling books because I believe in the contents of what the books are about. Books are super important to people, and they bring opportunity for insight.

There's still a chance to make it here in America because of the tremendous opportunities with the relatively fantastic infrastructure - streets, roads, support system.

In the 55 years that I've lived in Eastern Washington, I've had a pretty good life. And it's because of opportunity put in there by federal projects like the Grand Coulee Dam.

Thanks to the cheap electricity, I grew up in a growth economy. We never knew want. My father provided for his family, and most of my friends' fathers provided for their families with single-family jobs.