Election Angst

11/03/2020 is coming, and a lot of people are going to be disappointed. It matters not which side of the aisle they are on or which side "wins," more than half of the nation will be disappointed.

As important as this election may be, it is not going to resolve the major issues that have divided the nation over the last decades and increasing in vehemence of late.

We have forgotten how to talk respectfully to one another.

We have forgotten how to belong to one another beyond our political differences.

We have forgotten that there are things which are more important than who wields power.

Elections do not change racial demographics.

Elections do not resolve economic and social crises.

Elections do not fix racial disparities and so many other issues that produce our social and national angst.

Our economic system has produced too many losers and too few winners.

Our healthcare system has produced too many bankruptcies and leaves too many without affordable coverage or fighting with insurance companies who are more concerned with profits than the health of their customers.

Our justice system has failed to respond to its own injustices ranging from allowing divorce court to be used as a weapon by an angry former spouse to racial disparities in sentencing and treating crimes against corporations more harshly than the crimes of the corporations against their customers and employees.

We have this concept that voting on issues resolves tension. It does not. Votes do nothing to resolve tensions. As much as democracy may be a better system of government than any other human beings have devised, voting and elections do nothing in themselves to resolve conflict. That must come from some other quarter.

We can choose to address the issues that truly divide us. We can choose to respond the our anxieties and fears about our present and our future. Here is a secret: our anxieties are not about God, not about abortion, not about communism, not about socialism, not about criminals roaming the streets, not about clothing styles, not about language, not about science, not about education, and not about the stock market.

Our real anxieties tend to be much closer to home. They are about being heard. They are about being valued. They are about being accepted. They are about losing our identity or place in society amid the inevitability of change.

An election is not going to brush all of that away. It is not going to solve the deep divides in our society, for the reasons for those divides are not about the official, public platform issues. We can only resolve the real issues by seeing one another as connected to and part of ourselves. We must get back to a more basic principle on which our government was founded: “We the people ... in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….”

That is the kind of political action we need. It is not so much about elections and voting. It is about determining that we must come together in order to build something better than we have yet seen. It will take much more than politicians to get us there. As long as we are relying on political parties to do what then are simply unable to do, we will be sorely disappointed in them. We should be disappointed in ourselves.


— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/

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