Despite attempting to swear off political posts for the month, I’m still unhooking from political news and chatter. It’s hard to avoid and today is election day. I’ve just returned from voting. Unfortunately, numerous contests will be litigated for weeks or months on end. The upside of this is that I will not stay up for results, nor check my phone every two minutes throughout the night. I will sleep. Politics do not own me (and I will keep repeating that mantra until I get my sleep, dammit).
I’m still reading Donna Cameron’s book A Year of Living Kindly. Normally, I’m a fast reader, but some books require breaks – time to absorb meaning and think about how it applies to one’s own life. It’s a gentle read for caustic times. In a world full of shouting and knee-jerk reactions, I’m determined to take myself down a different path. Which is why much of my reading lately has focused on ethics and integrity. This morning, though, I read Chapter 30: Choosing to be For or Against. I put the book aside, leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.
I learned long ago that living in resistance to something is still a negative choice. If I wanted to break out of particular family cycles, I’d never truly be free if I only focused on who I didn’t want to be. I had to know who I wanted to be. I had to know the kind of family life I wanted, what kind of person I wanted to share my life with, what kind of parent I wanted to be. Sometimes those things did not seem clear to me until after making many, many mistakes, but when I realized what my values were, I began to make decisions on their behalf. This is a much harder path to follow than simply not being the other.
Winning or losing, picking a side, this is the least interesting dynamic of any human interaction. But it is the easiest way to sort and categorize people. It’s the easiest way to reduce complex, nuanced thought to a grunt. It’s the easiest way to give up your humanity, your individuality, your sense of right and wrong and to take away that of others.
There is life beyond the power-grab-swap-meets every few years. All politics aside, we still have to look ourselves in the mirror and ask “Am I a decent human being?” After tuning into social media and seeing the mindless droning of insults and labels, I realized very quickly that I need to check myself, away from the din of politics. I know that I have a moral center and personal integrity, but it’s become so fuzzy of late. What do I stand for? What am I willing to fight for, believe in, support? Notably this is not a “who” question, because principles and values are not fungible depending on who is in charge.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
Being for something means that my values are not dependent on what the other side is doing. Being for something means that I have a course set before me that is positive. The point of propaganda is that most phrases have very little specific meaning. They’re reductive and easily come to represent the worst of any group. It’s too easy to absolve ourselves of personal responsibility. This is why group dynamics freak me out – when people become essentially nothing more than a bumper sticker, engaging in polemics they wouldn’t repeat on their own.
Perhaps it seems the height of luxury (and of privilege) to insist on one’s own trajectory, to put aside all politics for the moment and say Who do I want to be? Who am I capable of being? Am I being that person now? Much of politics is illusory and is a poor basis for defining one’s humanity. Part of the game is to keep us at each other’s throats, so that we don’t mind our pockets getting picked and lives being diminished. Those in the arena just want to fill the seats – they don’t care how.
The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.
Abigail Van Buren
Today is a good time to step back. Do your civic duty and vote – then let it all go for a moment. Think about what is important to you as an individual. Get off social media, shake off the sloganeering of whomever you’ve aligned yourself with this political season. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you being a good parent, spouse, neighbor, friend? Are you kind and generous of spirit?
Whatever the results are tomorrow, none of us are winning if we serve as mouthpieces for scripted politics. What we represent first and foremost is ourselves. Who is that going to be?
The Green Study 
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