However You Do It, Vote!

Absentee ballots ready to return to the post office for mailing

Kathy & I requested absentee ballots as soon as they were available, mailed them last week, they have arrived at the Board of Elections and are ready to be counted.  Easy, peasy.  No worrying about long lines, nasty weather or shenanigans at the polls.  And as it turns out, we are in fact going to be out of town on Election Day.  We’ve either used early voting or absentee voting for a number of years, and truthfully think it is a much better process than voting in person at a polling place.  But for a lot of people I guess it’s the way it’s always been.  Sort of like getting the newspaper every day.  But whatever…done is done, a vote is a vote!

No political messages here.  But I will say this: perhaps this year more than ever, be sure and really pay attention to your choices for Congress and the Senate and, where applicable, your governor and state representatives.

I read a quote recently in Of Bears and Ballots by Heather Lende that caused me to look into the source to gain the original context.  With apologies for the length, I think it is worth sharing:

“In the last half of the twentieth century, thankfully, our society began to engage in a serious process of trying to atone for the sin of slavery, and in doing so much emphasis was placed on promoting civil rights. An unintended consequence of this important movement was a heightened focus on individuals and individual exercise of the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. The civil rights movement came out of community, but the legal expression focused on individuals’ capacity to exercise their freedoms. Some fearful Americans—largely white men who professed a conservative version of Christianity—felt threatened, as if there were not enough rights to go around. They sought to create their own “movement.” This reaction in part fueled the rise of the tea party movement. . . .

But a democracy cannot survive if various groups and individuals only pull away in different directions. Such separation will not guarantee that all are allowed the opportunity for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” All people must be recognized for their inherent dignity and gifts regardless of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or their place of origin. And all these gifts need to be shared in order to build up the whole.

So I have begun to wonder if the new task of the first half of the twenty-first century should be a commitment to civil obligations as a balance to the focus on civil rights.

Civil obligations call each of us to participate out of a concern and commitment for the whole. Civil obligations call us to vote, to inform ourselves about the issues of the day, to engage in serious conversation about our nation’s future and learn to listen to various perspectives. To live our civil obligations means that everyone needs to be involved and that there needs to be room for everyone to exercise this involvement. This is the other side of civil rights. We all need our civil rights so that we can all exercise our civil obligations.

The mandate to exercise our civil obligations means that we can’t be bystanders who scoff at the process of politics while taking no responsibility. We all need to be involved. Civil obligations mean that we must hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and we must advocate for those who are struggling to exercise their obligations. The 100 percent needs the efforts of all of us to create a true community.

It is an unpatriotic lie that we as a nation are based in individualism. The Constitution underscores the fact that we are rooted and raised in a communal society and that we each have a responsibility to build up the whole. The Preamble to the Constitution could not be any clearer: “We the People” are called to “form a more perfect Union.” ”

Reference:

Simone Campbell with David Gibson, A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community (HarperOne: 2014), 180-182.

4 thoughts on “However You Do It, Vote!”

  1. Tom, you could not be more correct about the importance of voting this year. I am concerned that you do not have sufficient postage on your mail in ballots. Here mailed ballots require $1.26 postage.

    1. Thank you, Jeff (? – I’m assuming that’s correct since it is in your email address). No, the postage is correct. In fact the tracking information has confirmed that the ballots have been safely delivered and are in the possession of the Board of Elections. Depending on the size and weight, I’m sure the postage can vary by location.

    1. We can only hope that all the people who say they will be voting actually do it. According to the Washington Post, here in North Carolina nearly 1 in 5 of roughly 500,000 who have returned mail ballots so far did not vote in the last presidential election.

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