I Am Not Hamlet

Image courtesy vox_efx, creative commons As I write this, the presidential election is still undecided. Which is fine. The Republicans have campaigned for 17 months now...there ought to be a law against that! When I wake up tomorrow morning, we will have a new President-elect, and frankly I don't care who it is because both the major party candidates nauseated me. I voted for a small third-party that I was actually excited about, that I believe(d) in, and may try to get involved at the local level at some point. That was important to me--voting for something, rather than against. If tomorrow morning you wake up in agony at the thought of our new president, ignore it. Better yet, put that energy into your community. Fill blessing bags for the homeless to carry in your car. Go to a parks commission meeting. Tutor a struggling student. Learn the names of the trees in your neighborhood. Know your watershed. Help a neighbor rake leaves. Learn your neighbor's names! ...

From Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community : We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well totalitarian rulers know this. Even constitutional guarantees and organic laws dim to popular vision when the social and cultural identities of persons become atomized, when the reality of freedom and order in the small areas of...

I noticed on an Fb post today (and I've heard it in the past as well) the notion that if one doesn't vote, one doesn't have the right to "bitch."  I have to take exception with that.  I think voting is probably the easiest and least costly civic duty we Americans have.  In fact, given our political class, I think too many of the wrong people are voting.  Too many demagogues and not enough statesmen.  I don't think you have much of a right to complain when all you did was show up at a school or a church and spend five to ten minutes filling out some form.  How does that entitle you to bitch? If you really want to earn your "bitching" rights then perhaps you should start by serving some time on a committee or board in your community.  Maybe you could participate in a park or natural area clean-up once or ten times in a lifetime.  Volunteer at a school or nursing home nearby.  Get to know your neighbors beyond BBQ and beer.  Find a way to...

If we are to have a democracy at all, it seems obvious that we must have a State populated not by anonymous economic units, but by men and women who can know, and be known by, one another.  The anonymous man is in a sense no man at all.   --Willis Fisher, "Small-Town Middle-Westerner" from Who Owns America?