Betsy stepped out of her shoes, let her purse fall to the floor right next to the door, and walked over to the couch as if someone had turned up the gravity in her house. She flopped down onto the cushions with a whoosh of breath, and quietly resolved to herself that she wouldn't even think about moving for at least a few minutes. Even something as simple as finding the remote could wait--all her shows were Tivoed anyway, which was a good thing considering it was seven o'clock and she'd just now gotten home from work.
Betsy's stomach growled irritably, but she was in no mood to cook right now. "Screw it," she muttered to herself. Her diet could go to hell for one day; she'd probably burned off enough extra calories running up and down stairs to be able to scarf down a whole pizza without any noticeable effects. She closed her eyes. In a minute or two, she told herself, she'd get up, grab the phone, and order some food. In a minute. In just a...
The doorbell rang. Betsy opened her eyes wide in the manner of someone who realized that "a minute or two" had already turned into seven minutes and was well on its way to more, and stumbled to her feet. She felt a moment of disorientation as she wondered if this was the pizza getting here, but she remembered as she opened the door that she hadn't actually ordered it yet; besides, the woman at the door was definitely no delivery driver.
Internally, she groaned at the sight of the sharply dressed woman with her blonde hair pulled back into an immaculate bun. *Not another one*, she thought. Three days before the election, and it seemed like they were showing up on an hourly basis now. Betsy couldn't tell which party this girl was from; her campaign button just had a little display of blinking colored lights that spelled out 'VOTE'. Betsy hoped this one was just here to ask if she was registered--she'd had to get pretty snippy with the last one who'd wanted her to volunteer at the polling place. Twelve hour days (on a good day), six days a week, and they wanted her to volunteer?
Even so, she opened the door. It always seemed to take less time to talk to them than to wait for them to quit ringing the doorbell. "Hi," she said, hoping that the bleary look in her eyes and the exhausted tone in her voice would help to cut this short.
"Hi!" the girl said in a perky, yet somehow oddly forceful tone. "I'm Anna, and I'm with the Campaign To Get Out And Not Vote." She pressed a tiny stud on her button, and another set of blinking colored lights traced a circle around the word 'VOTE', then drew a line across it. They vanished, and began to trace again. "May I come in?"
"I, um, what?" Betsy blinked away a little of the sleep in her eyes as she stared in confusion at the blinking button. Had she heard that right? She must have, the button was crossing it out, but... "What?" she said again.
"Thank you," Anna said, stepping inside and taking Betsy's arm. "As you know," she said as she led Betsy to the couch, "at least a third of the country doesn't vote in the national elections every two years. We at the Campaign To Get Out And Not Vote think that if a third of the country doesn't care about something, it can't be that important, really. We're hoping on your support to not care about it either."
"I, but..." Was she still asleep? Was this a dream? Was it a joke, maybe, some kind of weird performance art? "But, um...voting's important," she said numbly as she sat down. If she was really on 'Candid Camera' or something, she at least didn't want to look stupid.
"Let me ask you," Anna said briskly, "do you know how many people live in the state of California?" Betsy started to speak, but Anna cut her off before she could even get out a word. "It's over thirty-six million. Your vote only counts as one three-hundred-sixty-thousandth of one percent of the electorate, Betsy. Statistically speaking, you're not important. You're insignificant."
Betsy felt a surge of irritation at that, but before she could respond, Anna said, "Now obviously, you're not insignificant anywhere else in your life. Why should you spend so much time and effort on something that just reminds you of how little choice you really have in all the important decisions that affect you? Why should you make such a long, tiring journey out to the polling place, work so hard and make all those decisions, when it's really not going to matter how you vote? Someone else is going to run your life, Betsy. It's easier to just accept it."
Betsy stared in blank incomprehension at the blinking lights on the button as they traced their endless circle, around and around. She'd had way too long a day to handle this kind of conversation. Her head felt all muddy and jumbled from too little sleep combined with the beginnings of a nap cut off as it was getting started, Anna was rattling off her speech so quickly that Betsy couldn't even get a word in edgewise, let alone think about what she was saying, and politics had never really been Betsy's strong suit anyway. "I--"