I want it to be Law that you get an “I Voted!” sticker when you vote. Law; capital “L” Law.

I have been stickerless for a decade, and not because I don’t vote. I do vote. And each year I go into my polling place hoping, against all probability, that I will leave donning a sticker.

I was raised on gold stars, dammit! Don’t take my “I Voted!” sticker away and assume I will just go quietly along, submitting to pointless joylessness.

I will not! I want my sticker!

I watched my parents receive their “I Voted!” stickers each year at the Eagle Bay Firehall. I was even given stickers before I could vote. The “I Voted!” sticker is the fuzzy, happy, glowing memory that keeps me coming back each year… even after a decade of being denied this symbol of American Freedom.

That’s right; this is about Freedom!

When I take up watching FoxNews, and begin screaming about how “I want my country back!”; it’ll be the absence of this sticker that my particular screams will be about.

The stinging burn of my missing badge of Freedom could be building a festering rage in my patriotism even as you read this.

Here lies the foundation of anger that all my future decisions will be based upon.

Any penny-pinching measure that brings about a lowly state of no “I Voted!” stickers is based on a ridiculous premise.

Such a policy is more of a Dust Buster of Happiness and Civic Pride than anything even bordering responsibility.

Do not float the numbers by me! I’m part of the 99% and I’m 100% “Mad as Hell!” about stickers and only partially upset that my future will include scorched landscapes and no healthcare.

I don’t want to hear the math.

I don’t need an apology.

Don’t even send me a post-election sticker.

We The People are about to hear the tallies of this election, as I write this prior to the closing of the polls. If we’re so inclined, we’ll even listen to the fallout from this stickerless day.

And at some point the whole thing will shift from noise about this election to noise about the upcoming election.

Cheap, stupid political signs will be everywhere again. Election Day will be right around the corner.

If I have to sit through attack ads, lies, promises, back-stories, and other detritus too rancid for even a compost pile; I want my “I Voted!” sticker. I earned it.

Making it to the finish line each election season is getting to be a perfidious adventure filled with loud opinions from talking heads.

Polling places on the other hand are calm, clean, welcoming and staffed with hardworking volunteers.

Talking heads give you commercials.

Polling place volunteers give you a sticker (then in a few days it will have too much hair and crumbs attached to it to stick to any surface, and you’ll throw it out).

Here’s hoping all my Adirondack peeps (I refer to you all as Thibado Nation) got a sticker on Election Day!

You can tell Ken Thibado where to stick it at HalfStache@me.com.