Hello, and thank you for stopping by. My name is Harlan Weiss. I am 55 years old and I have been a union electrician for 33 years, most of it wiring schools, hospitals and office buildings around the Miami Valley. I have been married to my wife Carol for 31 years. We have one daughter, Katie, who is 19 and away at college and who told me I should "put my opinions somewhere other than the dinner table." So here they are.

I want to say right up front that this is not a page about parties. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I am going to tell you to show up. That's the whole sermon. The rest is just stories from my own life.

Our town council meets the second Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. in the municipal building. There are forty folding chairs. On a normal night about six of them have people in them, and one of those is me. The coffee is not good. I go anyway.

Here is why. Almost everything that actually touches your life, your street, your water, your kid's walk to school, gets decided in a room like that, by people you could talk to if you walked in the door. Most folks never walk in the door. Then they're surprised. I'd rather not be surprised.

Two years ago they asked me to sit on the Board of Zoning Appeals. It pays nothing. Mostly it is fences, setbacks, and one fellow who wanted a pole barn bigger than his house. I read every packet cover to cover. I figure if a man is going to come stand in front of us about his fence, he deserves somebody who did the homework.

At the corner by the park, where the kids cut across to the elementary school, cars used to come through at 40 miles an hour. I watched a boy on a bicycle get missed by about a foot. That night I wrote a letter.

It took six meetings. The first time they thanked me for my comments. The second time they said they'd look into it. The third time I brought a clipboard and a count of every car through that corner between 7:30 and 8:15 for two weeks. The fourth time I brought four neighbors. The fifth time they ordered a traffic study. At the sixth meeting, it passed.

The sign went up on a Thursday. I stood on that corner the next morning with my thermos and watched every car stop. I am not ashamed to tell you I got a little choked up over a piece of red sheet metal. Six meetings. That's all it took. You could do that too. That's my point.

My dad was a machinist at a plant here in Dayton for 38 years. When he passed I found his first union card in his wallet, worn soft as a dollar bill, with his signature on it from 1946. He'd carried it every day of his life. I carry it now, right behind my own.

He used to say, "Nobody gave us anything. We showed up, and we kept showing up." He meant the union hall, but he voted in every election I can remember too, including the ones for school board where nobody else bothered. He'd come home, hang up his hat, and say, "Well, I did my part." I think about that a lot.

Last November Katie voted for the first time. I drove her to the church where our precinct votes, and I did not ask her who she was voting for, and she did not tell me, and that is exactly how it should be. She came out of the booth, looked at me, and said, "That's it?"

I said, "That's it, sweetheart. That's the whole thing." Then I bought her pancakes at the diner on the way home, and she wore her "I Voted" sticker the whole meal. Best breakfast I ever paid for.

If you agree with me, or if you don't, I'd like to hear from you. I answer all my e-mail, though sometimes it takes me a week because I type with two fingers.