I voted yesterday. I was worried that my absentee ballot wouldn't arrive in time, but it did and its in the mail. Now, I only have to worry about it getting back in time. I won't waste much energy worrying about whether or not it will actually be opened and looked at. Fortunately, I am not from a state that actively looks for reasons to disqualify military votes, like Virginia, but I also know that absentee ballots are only opened when the margin from regular voting is close enough that they could make a difference. Utah leans pretty hard to one side of the political spectrum, so it is unlikely that my vote would need to be checked. So why vote at all?
Voting is simultaneously a right garanteed by the Constitution, a privelege of citizenship and the duty of a patriot, and other things to other people. Which attribute has primacy for different people is interesting to observe.
For some people, it is the privelege of voting that is of highest importance. These people are usually well educated in our history, whether by study or experience, and are deeply grateful to be citizens of our country. They remember the "captivity of their fathers" and the great things the Lord has done for them. For some immigrants, this memory is not figurative, but even people with deep generational roots can have this kind appreciation.
Those who vote out of a sense of duty are very closely related to those who consider voting to be a privelege. Robert Heinlein said that duty is a debt that you owe to yourself for having taken upon yourself an obligation of your owe free will. Being born into citizenship, while a blessing that most of the world's children are denied, carries with it the disadvantage that unearned wealth is rarely appreciated. In the sense that Heinlein gave to duty, one may be born a citizen but not born to duty.
Many people, though far too few, do make the leap from passive citizenship to active citizenship by a conscious act of will, deciding that they will be an agent for good in their community and nation. They do not vote out of habit, nor because they are expected to, but because they know that it is by the voice of the people that the course of our nation is steered. They do not vote in ignorance, nor is their vote driven by the passions of the crowd, but by study, and occasionally by prayer.
I prefer to describe voting by these two attributes, and I hope that my voting is due mostly to a sense of duty to my community and country and a sense of gratitude for the blessings of freedom. Having been born into this magnificent birthright with roots at least seven generations deep, I could easily have come to take it for granted and sold it, as Esau did to Jacob, for something of far less worth. But I prefer to think of voting as a right only when it is unjustly threatened, particularly since the meaning of the word "Right" has been so thoroughly polluted in the political discourse of recent decades.
The Constitution does not grant or create any rights out of nothing. It only specifically garantees a few such rights as already exist in nature and even goes so far as to note that it makes no attempt to exhaustively list all such rights, but limits the power of government to any of them, whether they are overtly mentioned or not. Rights are inherent in humanness and do exist even when there is no piece of parchment to say so. But rights in this pure sense also are indivisably joined to responsibilities. Right and duty are necessary opposites and one is dead without the other.
From before the world was, there were those who rebelled against this duality and have sought to have the good without paying the cost. There are people, sadly, who see voting first, foremost and only as a right without acknowledging either privelege or duty. In this election, especially, I see too many people who will vote, not in profound gratitude or solemn obligation, but as a weapon weilded against those of their fellow citizens that they have designated as their mortal enemies.
They are universally without a sense of history preferring the complicated simplicity of madcap cartoons to the simple complexity of the grand vista of real hisory. They see the world in black and white, or red and blue, by refusing to recognize the full spectrum of the rainbow that colors the real world.
This division is not strictly defines by politcal ideology. Those who vote out of privelege or duty can disagree on the course to take, but they are not disagreeable about it. I may not like their ideas. I may believe that their ideas are profoundly damaging to the interests of my country. But I do not believe that such people are my enemies, and, in victory or defeat, I will still respect them.
However, as a rule, voting as a privelege or duty and voting as a weapon do not mix to a great degree in the politcal spectrum. Most of the former are one one side, and most of the latter are on the other, and for the first time in my political life, my natural optimism is being tested. I hope that such people as would see me as their enemy, if I came to their attention, are kept out of power by those they elect, if they win. It is my privelege and duty to stand against them. I hope that I chose well.
