Elections
November 3rd, 2010Both my hands and my brain are too tired to write this post, but I still need to get a few rough thoughts onto the page.
Some in the media are calling tonight a “Republican landslide” and asking whether Democrats will “hear the voice of the people” - a voice theoretically calling them to turn their backs on and harden their hearts against those very same people? It makes no sense.
A small group of ruthlessly wealthy people spending unprecedented piles of money to confuse and inflame and distort the minds and hearts of millions of other, more normal people, does not a mandate make.
I don’t honestly believe that our fellow so-called average Americans don’t want their neighbors, children, or elders to have medicine, food and shelter. I don’t believe that the same so-called average Americans are “angry with Obamacare” (angry with being cared for?)… in part, because I highly doubt that the average American has any real sense of what their own current or any new and forthcoming health care policies are or will provide or deny.
Instead, what many Americans have been fed is a persistent diet of fear, conflated with rage. I borrow from what my Irish American mother calls the potato theory ~ as in potato famine. Media is being used to work folks into a frenzy of fear. They believe, because they have had the idea drilled into their minds and bodies 24/7, that there are not enough potatoes to go around. They are told in constant imagery and soundbites that if they do not rabidly attack other people - if they are foolish enough to share and trust - they will themselves starve.
They hate because they fear. But that’s not the same as wanting your neighbor to suffer. It’s a panic mode. And panic isn’t a mandate.
When I was growing up, it was the Russians we were taught to panic over. If we didn’t build our military, build bigger, better (?) bombs, then the Soviets would come and wipe us all away. Before then it was the Japanese, now it’s the Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslims. Someone is going to steal from us. Someone is going to take our livelihood, our home, our safety.
And that is true. Someone(s) is taking our livelihood, our homes, our safety - clean water, air to breathe, food to eat. But it’s not the Russians, Chinese, Mexicans or Muslims. It’s a tiny group of people who are literally enslaving and imprisoning vast numbers of “average” Americans. It is a tiny group of people who have so much material wealth - such a disproportionate ownership of our common lands - that they can, for example, spend $142 million dollars of personal funds on a campaign.
Election season both intrigues and repels me. I am inspired when I see people coming together and caring. I am repelled by the creepy, insidious attitudes of wealth and power, by the knowledge that many people are playing very nastily, and by the bizarre rewrites of reality. I want that awfulness to be over, for elections to be a different beast entirely.
Tonight, I voted for some candidates who delight me, people I am genuinely glad to see on the street. I voted for some candidates who do a good job, whose work I can count on even if I wouldn’t necessarily want them over for tea. I voted for some candidates who caused to me grimace, but are better than the alternatives. Some of these people will “win” the job in question. Some won’t.
But if this is our country, our place, our world, then it both does and it doesn’t matter who won tonight. Because we all have to keep working at bettering it, regardless. Not just politics, not just candidacies… but life. This is all about life, after all, right? Not about some theoretically bloodless competition, some footballish brain-squashing political hunger game?
And because this is life, I want to keep shifting the world so that the things that delight me - which absolutely include caring for elders, children, and neighbors; the things that make me pleased to be a human - most of all, when I see an unassailable presence of compassion; that these will be the space and the heart my fellow leaders and followers are striving for too. So that increasingly, it’s not a vote of this against that, or these against those, but a moment to consider who is best suited to carry out the charge of humanity in each of our communities at a given space in time.
I want elections to be nothing about fear, or rage, or hatred. I want us to be intelligent enough that we can’t be spun to attack each other… that we can’t be spun away from the field in which there is plenty of food growing, be told to look instead at a cold wall and believe that there is too little here… that we can’t be spun out of reality, so that we scrabble against each other on the cement while the whole verdant world is there, having our back, if we just turn around.
I want our leaders across the board to be people who are seeking to grow our garden, for everyone. I want the only spinning we do to be in celebration.
In the meantime, I am and will be grateful for those people whom I believe are carrying that charge of humanity and compassion, and who are strong-willed and resilient enough to bring that into the current, difficult, cement-scrabbling political discourse. Thank you. Let’s all join that party together? There is room for everyone.
