They are all over central Iowa. We don’t even see them. People society deems to be unimportant or invisible. We walk to the polls today to make a choice we believe will, in some small measure, improve our lives.

Many do not walk to the polls because they can’t and they are so invisible that the candidates do not even include them on their campaign talks or within their platform rhetoric.

Price controls on prescription drugs may allow more senior citizens the chance for an affordable rendezvous with biochemistry, but it does not alleviate or even address the needs of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes.

Americans rendered voiceless from a stroke. Americans unable to vote due to imprisonment within their bodies. Americans who suffer at the hands of largely underpaid, under qualified, overworked primary care givers. Americans who gave their lives to serve their country in war time and gave their children unprecedented prosperity lie in beds in nursing homes, their family hundreds of miles away, receiving impersonal cares and little spiritual nourishment. Our most vulnerable and yet most proud group of people will be absent from the political history made today.

Several agencies in Story County serve the local homeless and the many more on the verge of losing their homes. Last year, the Emergency Residence Project alone wrote checks to save 611 Story County residents who were faced with eviction. The shelter houses people down on their luck, whose resources have been drained through illness, family tragedy or addiction. The guests in the shelter can stay for two weeks while they find a job, and the project helps them find a place to live. The face of homelessness has a name in Story County.

After a discussing binary numbers, electrical circuits, and artificial intelligence with a brilliant member of the Ames homeless population, a friend commented, “Wow, I never knew someone like that could be homeless.”

He had suddenly seen himself, an electrical engineer, reflected in the eyes of an invisible member of society. If you don’t have an address, in which precinct do you register to vote? Members of society for whom large government social programs have failed will not be going to the polls in large numbers. They will be left out of the decisions made today.

Hispanics and other immigrant groups comprise the heart of meat processing in central Iowa. I had the chance to assist in English classes held at a church in Hampton.

The students in the class have a long, labor intensive day on the bloody kill floor of a packing plant, then they shower, dress to the nines and come to class for two hours ready to learn as much as they can about our nonsensical tongue. In teaching them slang statements we use for money, my two conversation partners and I were laughing hard.

“OK, this means you don’t have any money.”

“I’m broken.” He tentatively responds.

“Not quite. We say ‘I’m broke.'”

They aren’t American citizens, yet they live here and need to obey our foreign laws, our social norms and endure the attitudes about immigrants.

“English is hard, but it’s so necessary,” commented one of the students, the words tumbling quickly from his mouth. He attends class four nights a week to learn as much English as possible while he works in a physically demanding job all day.

The U.S. food system needs workers like him to continue the processing operations in place. He can’t vote today, but he lives among people who do, people who can make decisions that will affect his prospects for a successful future.

We go to the polls today, and while we may emphatically dish out our opinions about what is good for us, have we considered our responsibility in using our voice for the voiceless as well?

Has it crossed our minds in our lukewarm response to our democratic rights that many among us are unable to exercise the rights we take for granted? Go to the polls and sound your voice. Do not forget when you are casting your vote that the invisible among us desperately need to be heard.

We cannot expect that a vote cast every four years will completely remedy the plight of the voiceless. Our vote, even in their advocacy is not enough. We must become the social service they are lacking. The human touch in the loneliness in the twilight years. The shared meal and conversation with the homeless man. The dignity to live and work extended to the immigrant.

It is only when we vote with our lives instead of only our ballots that our voices will take shape, and we will finally hear the voices of the invisible living among us in central Iowa.