Why not voting is a viable moral option
Dearest Danny,
There is a story I seem to remember about the unanimous-minus-one House vote to go to war the day after Pearl Harbor. One representative voted against going. When asked why, he said something to the effect that unanimity in politics is always dangerous and that his vote was a defense of that sentiment. I feel like my vote, or non-vote, is a defense of the neglected sanctity of the vote, of the idea and ideal that the choice we are given must be worthy of voting for in the first place. As I like to say about marriage, and its frequent patches of black ice, "If you can't love each other, love the vow."
I love the vote too much to squander it on fear or expedience. Through age, I have earned the right to consider the decision not to vote a valid exercise of that franchise. In the other, earlier phases of my life, the vote was about maintenance and preservation of a tolerable status quo. I was rendering to Caesar what was Caesar's, even in a land founded on the Declaration of Independence. But now it seems about something appropriate to a continuity of life that includes the departed as well as those who remain here. It is about honoring or dishonoring Zukofsky's "All"--All of It and All of Us.
Once poet Gary Snyder wrote to a Zen Master that he kept a .22 shotgun in his house and would feel perfectly fine about shooting a redneck intruder who intended violence to his family. To shoot, and possibly murder, was an expression of his family's right to survive. The Zen Master wrote back something to the effect that all this talk about survival to the exclusion of everything else made him wonder if survival was overrated.
In short, there are other reasons to vote or not to vote--and they are valid even if obscure or petulant or perplexing. Age and time and, hopefully, wisdom have allowed me access to a personal, possibly esoteric, but profoundly sensible residuum of motives for what I do. For me, not voting, unless absolutely convinced of the caliber of the candidate for whom I vote, is like a drunkard's first true, lasting step toward sobriety. There is no lonelier step. Please see the possibility of not voting as an act of courage which, at this late stage in the dissolution of America, could be needed and could, if examined closely, be redolent with laudatory virtue. See my not voting as offering you a steady hand to shake for the first time in decades. See it as renouncing or, better yet, letting go of the fear that has governed every vote I have ever cast for the presidency of our country.
Love,
David
P.S., I am tired of a Manichean world. I believe now that since good is gifted from God, and evil is merely 'allowed' by Him, virtue is the only legacy worth creating and capable of outlasting (as in outshining) us. The dust of the grave is heaven's refusal of evil and evidence of a rock-bottom, stubbornly compassionate forgiveness of sorts. I am, you might say, considering my vote as a citizen of heaven, as a returnee or aspirant to that Zion, whose only right of return (parodied here on earth by racist politics) is the preponderance of virtue in his life. I am voting for the weight of goodness in my/our life. I am voting for the feathery weight of virtue which is all that matters (is matter) and will endure of us to be permitted into paradise. It looks like not-voting here. But that's just another one of the dualities which are the coin of the Manichean realm.
There is a story I seem to remember about the unanimous-minus-one House vote to go to war the day after Pearl Harbor. One representative voted against going. When asked why, he said something to the effect that unanimity in politics is always dangerous and that his vote was a defense of that sentiment. I feel like my vote, or non-vote, is a defense of the neglected sanctity of the vote, of the idea and ideal that the choice we are given must be worthy of voting for in the first place. As I like to say about marriage, and its frequent patches of black ice, "If you can't love each other, love the vow."
I love the vote too much to squander it on fear or expedience. Through age, I have earned the right to consider the decision not to vote a valid exercise of that franchise. In the other, earlier phases of my life, the vote was about maintenance and preservation of a tolerable status quo. I was rendering to Caesar what was Caesar's, even in a land founded on the Declaration of Independence. But now it seems about something appropriate to a continuity of life that includes the departed as well as those who remain here. It is about honoring or dishonoring Zukofsky's "All"--All of It and All of Us.
Once poet Gary Snyder wrote to a Zen Master that he kept a .22 shotgun in his house and would feel perfectly fine about shooting a redneck intruder who intended violence to his family. To shoot, and possibly murder, was an expression of his family's right to survive. The Zen Master wrote back something to the effect that all this talk about survival to the exclusion of everything else made him wonder if survival was overrated.
In short, there are other reasons to vote or not to vote--and they are valid even if obscure or petulant or perplexing. Age and time and, hopefully, wisdom have allowed me access to a personal, possibly esoteric, but profoundly sensible residuum of motives for what I do. For me, not voting, unless absolutely convinced of the caliber of the candidate for whom I vote, is like a drunkard's first true, lasting step toward sobriety. There is no lonelier step. Please see the possibility of not voting as an act of courage which, at this late stage in the dissolution of America, could be needed and could, if examined closely, be redolent with laudatory virtue. See my not voting as offering you a steady hand to shake for the first time in decades. See it as renouncing or, better yet, letting go of the fear that has governed every vote I have ever cast for the presidency of our country.
Love,
David
P.S., I am tired of a Manichean world. I believe now that since good is gifted from God, and evil is merely 'allowed' by Him, virtue is the only legacy worth creating and capable of outlasting (as in outshining) us. The dust of the grave is heaven's refusal of evil and evidence of a rock-bottom, stubbornly compassionate forgiveness of sorts. I am, you might say, considering my vote as a citizen of heaven, as a returnee or aspirant to that Zion, whose only right of return (parodied here on earth by racist politics) is the preponderance of virtue in his life. I am voting for the weight of goodness in my/our life. I am voting for the feathery weight of virtue which is all that matters (is matter) and will endure of us to be permitted into paradise. It looks like not-voting here. But that's just another one of the dualities which are the coin of the Manichean realm.
posted by David Federman @ 3:43 AM
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