Tuesday, November 2, 2010

God Bless America

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I voted tonight. It was kind of a last-minute deal brought on by peer pressure. It wasn't that I'd planned not to vote, I just had better things to do. Things like working to effect real change beyond what the people I didn't vote for will be able to do (none of my guys made it). But I'll get to that in a minute.

I won't say that voting wasn't worth it. They gave everyone a Kit Kat at the end.

I managed to vote for one Democrat, one Republican, and one Libertarian. The Democrat was because his Republican foe is screwing up the university where I work by making everything about customer satisfaction, and eroding the academic culture he doesn't understand in favor of a business culture (which maybe he does understand, I don't know). The Libertarian was because his Republican foe didn't know where he stood on the very issues he was running on. Perhaps if his campaign manager had been running for office, I'd have voted for him. The Republican was because he was a judge that I know, and also because there was no one running against him.

The rest, I didn't know anything about. Maybe I was lazy and didn't brush up on all the candidates and where they stand on the issues. That's partly true. For the other part, I was too busy living a life of real change, beyond the empty rhetoric of those ascending to and descending from Washington. Not that my track record is squeaky-clean or honestly even that impressive. But it does exist. It exists in the form of building a family life on the foundation of new possibilities. It exists in the form of building a communal life on the foundation of ultimate hope, showing up now in tangible ways. It exists, but even more, it thrives.

And the fleeting hope of American politics pales in comparison to that kind of change. Tonight we swung the balance of power in the House of Representatives based on voter discontent. Come to think of it, we founded our country based on the same spirit of discontent: "We won't stand for x!" Just how far can you get on discontent? Even if you get pretty far, aren't you miserable the whole way? Don't you get wherever you're going by repeating vicious cycle after vicious cycle?

I heard someone describe one of the candidates who got elected as a breath of fresh air. We Americans get like this near election days. By "like this", I mean we get selective memories and forget the hundreds of times we've turned on the very people we looked to for change because the old discontent set in. How long before we're ready to skewer this most recent batch of elected representatives?

Where I work, I have a small window in on some of the less glamorous inner workings of government. I wouldn't say that affords me any power, just perspective. And while I see some buffoons, I don't see any more than I saw anywhere else I worked. What I do see is people who work very hard to make a very hostile system work. We Americans love to build massive machines to do our work for us, and think that if we can keep them running then everything will work out okay. Some of the politicians who we scorn the most have taken up the job of working in the sweatiest, most jerry-rigged parts of these unwieldy machines (or at least, they have aides who do), finding a way to keep things from grinding to a screeching halt, and it really is thankless work. It's not all schemes and power plays and conspiracies forged in secret - some of it is just plain dull, like everyone's job is.

So God bless these guys I didn't vote for. Their jobs are sure to suck, and we're sure to give them crap for doing those jobs no matter how well they do them - that's the kind of people we've been and are becoming. I hope some of them even get crap for doing the right thing, because Jesus said those people are blessed in his upside-down Kingdom. And God bless those who are making real change in whatever spheres of influence they have, however small, however imperfectly, and however unnoticed it goes. God bless us, discontent and cynical as we are. God bless America.