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So, we done did the election thing. Lulu and I piled into the car and went to do our civic duty, and we can therefore claim equal responsibility for any welcome developments with all the upstanding citizens who voted, and blame any negative outcomes on people like Ibrahim, who cynically opted out. and stayed home.
So here we are, the results are in, the dust is settling, waiting for the winds of change to rise and make a clean sweep, and it is a good time to reflect on our great republic’s democratic system and my part in it.
My first vote in a national election was cast for Richard M Nixon. No, wait, don’t leave the froom, and put down the rotten tomatoes and stones. The ticket was Eisenhower and Nixon, and I was in 4th grade. I have no idea if they still do it, and I did not and still do not understand why they did it then, but in 3rd grade we had to read and report on wars and peace talks which made no sense whatsoever, so as to be up on “Current Events”, and in 4th grade we had to pretend we were voting for president.
I was almost as politically savvy then as I am now. I voted, as I said, for Eisenhower and Nixon. My choice was based purely on the issues of the day – that is, I believed that my parents were going to be voting Republican, and I believed they must know what they were doing. Hey, we won – yay team.
No, I cannot tell you why I thought that they were Republican leaning. One of the many topics never discussed and rarely if ever mentioned at our house was politics. Some years later, having noted that most people in academia were functionally Democrats, and, running through the syllogism, recognizing my parents as part of the academic community, I decided they were probably voting Democratic. This too, was pure extrapolation from no evidence at all. To this day, I am pretty sure that they voted, but for whom, and what their feelings on the successive administrations might be, there is no way to know.
Time passed; after 4th grade I had little to do with elections until I was qualified to be a voter in my own right. Senior year high school I associated wit a crowd several of whom were politically conscious and even active. Since of the two most involved and conscious one was a Young Republican and the other a Young Democrat, and since they never explained their stances and since they were not that different, they did little to politicize me.
But I was starting to be aware of who was president, even of some candidates. I didn’t care much for Kennedy – there was too much fuss over him and I did not care for his First Lady. Disliked Johnson, had problems with Goldwater, did not trust Nixon. Rather fond of Carter and wary of Reagan – he was too big. This was all reaction to the person, policies were never clear enough to judge.
By this time I had a political stance. It was not as cynical as Ibrahim’s, but not dissimilar. In its original form:
I cannot really trust anyone in office except a few people I do know personally
No one I know personally is tunning for office
That over tme evolved, to become:
No one who wants to be elected can be trusted in office.
Voting at this point was fatalistic. I had passed beyond “I vote as I THINK my parents or my friends or my hero would vote”. I had avoided “Voting is a waste of time”, and arrived at “I will vote but it will change nothing”. I went to the polls, shrugged my shoulders, and picked what seemed the best of a pretty mixed barrel of pickles, with no expectations. Occasionally I would vote against one of the more objectionable. I think my vote in the last election involving Nixon went that way, an argument for the validity of my principle.
These days, I have changed. When I cast my vote this time, I reasoned:
No one I know and trust is running for office
Instinctively I think A is more trustworthy than B, less trustworthy than C
Statistically, one vote will have little effect on the outcome
Experience has shown my candidate is unlikely to win
But there IS a point to voting, because there IS a power that steers the voters, and the cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of arbitrary votes will put in place the right man at the right time, however any individual reasons.
So I vote. And I may not see an effect, but I believe, at least in this, in the theory of the butterfly stamping.
We hear – off and on – about how we need an educated and informed electorate to guarantee good government. I am sure that there are those who feel that if people are socialized right they – or their designees – will be elected. They may be right, up to a point. But I am educated – clearly educated is NOT the same thing as socialized. I am – kind of – informed; I have ready access to the facts and opinions running around the news media, and while I do not work at following Current Events [nor do I understand them much better than I did in 3rd grade] a lot sifts through. Clearly informed is NOT the same thing as convinced.
I have this feeling that there are a lot of people who vote their parent’s slate, or their friends’, or that of the blogger they follow. That a lot of people vote to be contrary, or vote at random despairing of beingh heard. That the number of people who clearheadedly weigh the candidates against the issues and so vote is small, and has little effect on the election, especially since such people almost certainly will disagree among themselves.
But – thank God! – I do not run this country any more than Mr. Obama does, and this butterfly [there is that song again!] will keep on stamping out the beat, playing my part in the Great Dance of the Butterflies.
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