November 5, 1996. I took my six-year-old daughter, Mairead, up the street to the old firehouse which was our polling location. We talked about the importance of voting and I cast my vote. Sure, it wasn’t particularly close that year, but it has always been important to me to get out and vote no matter how close the elections are.

Mairead was always very bright, and always ready for an argument, and I seem to recall that she felt it was unfair that she didn’t get to vote. After all, she was probably brighter and more informed than many of the adults voting. We probably talked a little bit about how laws were made and how when she was old enough, she could work on lowering the voting age.

Attorney General Blumenthal touched on this at the Obama Rally in Hamden, Connecticut last Saturday when he particularly thanked people that brought their children to the rally. We need to encourage civic involvement starting at an early age.

Twelve long hard years have come and gone. Mairead is off in college and I wanted to make sure she was registered and was going to vote. In response to an email I sent, she wrote, “I want to actually go to a voting place... Remember when you took me to the fire station for the '96 election? I've been waiting ever since.”

I suspect neither of Mairead nor I imagined what those twelve years would be like, or how historic her first vote would be. Yet perhaps that is an important lesson to all of us. Things that we talk about can carry greater significance than we think at the time, even if it takes twelve years to come to fruition.

I suspect the same applies to the comments we leave on blogs. At one blog I visit, a person posted a comment bewailing about the polarization of politics. That same person then went on to compare Obama to Hitler. Excuse me? I don’t think people that compare a U.S. Presidential candidate to Hitler has much ground to complain about other people polarizing politics.

In another discussion, I heard people complaining about how biased the media is and how bad it was that there weren’t going to be more debates. I remember many of the debates during the primaries where the moderator, typically a noted pundit or anchor from one of the major networks spoke more than the candidates. It reminded me of the old joke about a resort up in the Catskills. One person complained, “The food here is horrible” and the other replied, “Yes, and the portions are so small.”

I would love to see good debates that focus on the issues, and don’t resort to candidates and pundits yelling at one another about trivialities. I would love to see people on the web talk about politics without resorting to polarizing rhetoric, and I sure hope that a friend of Mairead will send me a picture this November of her wearing an “I Voted Today” sticker.

So yes, the portions of political dialog are small, the politics are too polarized, but to throw in another great quote, “There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.” So, let’s talk politics. If we can be grown up, the way my daughter was twelve years ago, we can do it without polarizing rhetoric, but even if the best you can do is be divisive, let’s have a discussion.