Election Memo by Rev. Tom Schade

The dozens of unanswered phone calls on my answering machine over a weekend told me it was election season. I listened to many of them; there's something about the cheerful and enthusiastic recorded greeting of an office-seeker that just lifts my spirits. But, of course, I am the type that gets a charge out of being hailed by the greeter at a WalMart.

During election season, opinion leaders engage in the ritual tut-tutting about the poor state of our democracy. Time to turn our ire on those awful TV ads that insult our intelligence. Time to trot out some aquatic metaphor for how a river, or flood, or ocean of "big money" is wreaking tsunami like damage on the political system.

Hip, smart, educated, and thoughtful people (like us) are expected to have a jaded boredom about politics and campaigns. Oh, the awfulness of the ads interrupting our TV watching, as though the ads for wireless phones and pharmaceuticals were better. Oh, the phone calls interrupting our dinner, as though we don't have caller id, and don't answer anyway. Oh, the visual clutter of lawn signs and bumper stickers, as though we were surrounded by beauty everywhere until a month ago. It seems to me that every newspaper is required by some faceless bureaucrat somewhere to run at least one article per day by some pseudo-cranky geezer about how awful the elections are. At least, it gives them a rest from writing articles bemoaning Facebook and Twitter and eulogizing their old rotary phones, as being essential to "real community".

Liberal Religion has a solution to the awful state of the republic. It's called "the Free Mind." In 1830, William Ellery Channing, the first Boston minister to claim the name "Unitarian" wrote these lines:

"I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with passive or hereditary faith... I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, and is not the creature of accidental impulse... I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion. I call that mind free which...possesses itself."

Everything that is wrong with our present electoral system is the consequence of the lack of self-possession of so many voters. The reason why money and fund-raising is so important is because candidates need to run ads on television. And the reason why 30-second ads are so crucial is because there are enough voters who will be influenced by an inflammatory ad to swing an election. In Channing's words, voters whose vote is "the creature of accidental impulse" seem to cast the deciding votes.

"Self-possessed voters," on the other hand, have worked out their stake in the election. They have a conscious method of determining their vote. They may vote their self-interest, or their ideology, or their principles, or their party, or the shared interests of their ethnic community, but they have decided, and are, thus, open to reconsider.

But there are voters, who like to think that they 'vote for the candidate and not the party', and having no other basis to decide, end up deciding during the campaign. They end up voting for the one they would rather have a beer with, or the one who is "one of us." They vote against someone because of their college pranks, or after hearing about single votes taken out of context, or the lurid re-tellings of their minor scandals.

No political reform can fix the problem of the unserious voter, so what stands in the way of people taking citizenship seriously? What are the obstacles to the free mind? There are too many to name; some promote an ideology of personal powerlessness and others offer illusions of power in trivial choices. (Shall we have McDonalds or Burger King for lunch today?)

There are too few voices that call upon each of us to stop and consider our own lives carefully and with the longest view, the largest perspective. Too few voices call upon us to work out the relationship between our individual selves and the larger society, so we can vote carefully to advance our own best common goals. To do so requires effort and self-possession, and it is a challenge, and a moral one, at that.