Before the Results Begin

I was asked by students more times today than I could count (a) if I had voted, and (b) who I was going to vote for.

In each case, I told them (a) not yet, and (b) that if they wanted to come back in three months and have a serious conversation about American politics, I would be happy. But that for today, I was not having any conversation with them about politics.

Too many of them, like too many members of our voting public, know nothing about American politics other than what they have heard on the television, or on the radio, or on Myspace, or on Facebook, or from their parents--in any case, they've heard it all within the last couple of months. And what they've managed to glean from these sources seems to me to be, in most cases, a collection of sound bites, but little more. It seems to me that far too few people understand, or are willing to consider, politics in a serious way, in a way that is willing to engage with the complexities of our world.

I found myself wondering last night, as I saw that nearly a million people had "donated their statuses" to get out the vote, how many of those people would still be paying attention in six months, or a year, once the frenzy of these campaigns subsides. (Side note: What does it even mean that a person can "donate" his status? Is there an economy in which Facebook status is a sort of social currency?)

I found myself wondering, too, and asking myself if any of the issues at stake here are really that important to us. Certainly, they're important, but are they important to you, specifically? or to me? Henry David Thoreau, a thinker whose voice I think is all-too-missing today, wrote this about voting:

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.

So I find myself wondering about the passion that people have for politics (and the accompanying issues) in the last month or so, and wondering what they would be willing to do. Thoreau admonishes us,

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

But how many of us are willing to use our "whole influence" to right the things we think are terribly wrong? How many of us are willing to feed the homeless, to challenge the health care system, to improve the education of our children, to take an active role in making our society based more on compassion and less on violence? And what would using our "whole influence" mean?

I fear that many of us have cast our strips of paper today, and that tomorrow, we will turn back to our lives, turning our backs on the things about which we have claimed to believe in so strongly.