‘Excited for it to be over’

The guy in the camel suit at the Beacon Falls firehouse just wants a return to normalcy. Maybe, just maybe, that will happen when Election Day comes and goes, and we have a winner.

“I’m excited for it. I’m also excited for it to be over, just to get all the nonsense out of the way,” said Dan Lapinski, who on Saturday played a camel at the Laurel Ledge Elementary School’s Halloween trunk-or-treat event.

“Once the election is over, we don’t have to worry about who everyone is voting for and we don’t dislike them based on who they voted for.”

Lapinski, an electrical installer on the Black Hawk program at Sikorsky, wouldn’t say whether he’s for President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden. Politically, he said, “I’m neither nor,” but then he added, “This is a free country and we need to keep it that way. You can vote your way into socialism but you have to fight your way out of it.”

I had never heard that one. Three days before the election, I took a mini tour of the state and discovered it’s easy to find people who consider themselves moderates, in the middle on the political spectrum — happy to see it all end.

It won’t end on Tuesday, of

course. And the divisiveness won’t end when we have a winner. But in Beacon Falls, in West Hartford, in Trumbull and in Bridgeport, I found an overwhelming hope that the nation’s gaping, bleeding political wounds will heal — starting with the vote that can’t come soon enough.

Shene Othello knows about bleeding wounds. She’s a paramedic who moved back this month from Miami to Bridgeport, where she went to Harding High School, where she can live with her mother and study for her undergraduate degree and eventually, medical school.

She’s a Biden voter but not as strident as many others. “I’m not sick of it and honestly, either way that it goes, I don’t mind.”

Echoing Lapinski in Beacon Falls, Othello declared, “I don’t identify as either … It’s about serving everybody.”

Trump shouldn’t have been president, Othello said as she paused to talk while walking her dog, Valerie. “It’s clear as day. He’s very ignorant, basically.”

As with Lapinski, her politics unfold with way more comlexity than the slogans make it all seem. Beacon Falls went 60 percent for

Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Bridgeport gave the reality TV star just 17 percent of its votes that year — and yet, the American zeal for at least the claim of political independence shines through.

Othello thinks back to Clinton in 2016, how much more focused she was on politics than Trump — meaning positively, on philanthropy and serving the public. “I was one of those idiots who didn’t vote,” she said.

Now she’s determined to cast a ballot, but it hasn’t arrived yet from Florida. When it does, she’ll send it back overnight. I tell her about Election Day registration in Connecticut and she wonders whether that would work — even as I hope she can vote in the crucial state where she’s still registered.

Her mother, in Bridgeport, worries about the security of her absentee ballot.

In Trumbull, I meet a woman named Karen who drops off her ballot as he husband, Don, waits in their dark blue Tesla. “I’m done!” she exclaims as I ask about her view of voting. “I just don’t want to be there on Tuesday with all those people.”

“The suspense was fun and now let’s change the topic,” Don, who’s driving the car, says. He intends to vote in-person, “just like the goodold days.”

Before we get away from politics, he has a few words about the national battle. “Between the media’s skew and the liberal pool, it’s hard to get an honest answer. It’s hard to get an unbiased answer.”

He rails against Facebook and Twitter for blocking the New York Post story on Biden’s son, Hunter, allegedly arranging for a meeting between a Russian energy executive and the then-vice president — which remains uncorroborated. I ask him to confirm who he’s voting for, as if it’s a mystery. “I want to get back to making America great again” is all he’ll say, joining the army of Trump voters who won’t fess up to it.

“There goes all my friends,” Karen says.

Trumbull went 49 percent for Trump, 47 percent for Clinton.

Karen won’t divulge her vote — even to Don — and declares the whole election process “too much, too long, too much in my face.”

Across the parking lot at Trumbull Town Hall, Jianbing Huang, voting after a tennis game, doesn’t think the process is too much at all. He grew up in the repressive, Maoist Cultural Revolution in China before emigrating to the United States in the early 1980s as a student.

“Some people, at least for us coming from China, really appreciate the process for voting and let the majority decide because otherwise the outcome would be chaotic,” he said.

We talked about the fake votes in his original homeland — truly fake votes — and Huang, wearing a tight, cotton mask and latex gloves, says he’s a centrist. The chemist for Kodak likes some of what Trump has done and says, “his style is rather unique.”

In measured tones, he adds, “In the media, it’s like the world will be over if the other side wins.”

That idea, that the world is at stake, seems to bother a lot of people even though, for so many of us, it’s basically true. Underneath the divisive process a centrist culture tries to emerge.

That’s what I witnessed on Saturday in very different places, from very different people within a few miles of each other in the same small state.

They are the voices of moderate idealism, though they reflect some strong political views. Lapinski, in Beacon Falls, talks about arguments he has with liberals at Sikorsky. Friendly arguments, I gather — sort of. He asks them why they don’t turn in their badges and stop working on the Black Hawk, legendary symbol and workhorse of the American military.

“We have enough craziness going on right now,” he said, with COVID. As for the election, “I’m kind of sick of it, which is why I’m looking forward to it.”

Earlier in the week, I talked with a man in West Hartford who only gave his first name, Don, who had just dropped off his ballot — and slammed both presidential contenders. “Trump don’t know how to talk to people but Biden, he forgets what he said. …To me, that’s dangerous if you have to deal with foreign countries.” And he added, “he puts his hands on women.”

He favors the wall to keep out migrants in Mexico. And he likes Trump’s strong personality.

And yet, he voted for Biden and thinks the Democrat will win. “It depends on how the Black vote goes around the country,” said Don, a Hartford custodian who is African American.

He voted for Trump in 2016. “The biggest thing that made me change was his cockiness, his arrogancy.”

He added, “I want it to end because it seems like things are going in circles.”

In Trumbull, Huang, who wouldn’t say how he voted, is looking for a resolution that won’t come easily, if at all.

“The key is after the election people come together.”