Last week I had a brief conversation with two of my neighbors about politics and, specifically, my avoidance thereof. We touched on only the first of the topics I cover in this post, but I thought it might be helpful to me, and perhaps others, if I use this space to clarify my thoughts.
It's an unavoidable fact of life that politics happen. Yet individual citizens have essentially no influence over the course of governance, even though we have to live with the consequences. What's worse, through a kind of collective guilt we often feel somewhat responsible for (or aghast at) the actions of our political "leaders", despite the fact there's almost nothing we can do to change the situation. So I got to wondering: can I make the political personal but in a healthy way, as I've been working to personalize so much else?
As I've described before, I used to pay a lot of attention to political matters, I had opinions about various domains of government policy, I wrote letters to the editor, and I even participated in the occasional rally or attended the occasional city council or county commissioners' meeting. However, that simply raised my stress levels and didn't do anyone else any good, either. Slowly I realized that I have absolutely no influence in Washington D.C., Denver (the capital of Colorado), or even Castle Rock (our county seat). The main reason is that national, state, and even county governance is impersonal: I don't have relationships with the people involved and I don't particularly want to, because building such relationships would turn me into a more political person than I intend to be in life.
However, there is a place and community where I can and already do have such relationships, and that's my neighborhood of about 500 people. Since we moved here twelve years ago, I've served fairly regularly on our neighborhood association's board of directors, I've taken on management of our website, and last April I was selected to serve as the board president. Currently I'm also collaborating with the board presidents of two abutting neighborhoods to oppose a proposed urban-style development in our semi-rural area, which has entailed communicating with the planning department, attending planning commission meetings, and so forth. It's this very local level of political activity and community contribution where I can have a positive impact, so that's where I focus my energies.
The second topic is electoral politics, which for most people means voting (few of us are going to run for office, although earlier in life I contemplated it somewhat seriously and I helped out with a few campaigns). To put it bluntly: the act of voting might feel personally significant, but societally it is inconsequential. These days when everything is so politicized, the worst consequence of voting is offending friends and family; sadly, I've known several couples who nearly ruined their marriages of 20, 30, or 40 years over political disagreements, especially over the extremely divisive figure of Donald Trump.
Here too I've had a personalist realization: I don't know the people running for office. Yes, I might have impressions (often pretty strong impressions), but I don't know them. Leaving aside the well-known national personalities, how am I to make decisions about voting on candidates for, say, county commission or school board? I don't know if these people have good character, good judgment, and good intentions (the three primary factors underpinning the development of personal trust, as Aristotle outlined at Rhetoric 1378a8). Will they make well-reasoned, evidence-based decisions, avoid partisanship, have a strong ethic of public service, listen to the citizens, collaborate in an open-minded fashion with all the relevant stakeholders, not be corrupted by the power of their office, and so on? I have no idea, because I don't know these people. Consistent with Dunbar numbers, there are maybe 150 people in the whole country whom I know well enough to entrust with my vote, and they're not on the ballot!
What to do? Well, I've started simply leaving my ballots blank for all elected offices (I do still vote on initiatives and referendums). I refuse to have my politically somewhat dissonant voice be constrained by those little circles on the ballot and I won't be forced to vote for someone I don't know and trust merely in order to vote against someone else whom also I don't know and trust - especially because it is so easy for other folks to misconstrue that putative vote "for" as the kind of true endorsement that in all honestly I cannot provide.
This brings things back around to the first topic: I am trying to make a positive difference in the only way I know how, which is personally serving the community in my own neighborhood. Everything else in politics strikes me anyway as sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Naturally and as always, what works for me won't necessarily work for you...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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