Office Hours: Cast your ballot: Voting is a declaration for peace over battle

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Office Hours: Cast your ballot: Voting is a declaration for peace over battle
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I voted for the first time during a midterm election. We experienced it while living under two distinct shadows. It was the first federal election after 9/11. A world made new, in ways we then could hardly fathom, had changed our lives and our politics more than anything I had yet seen. It was also the first after the 2000 election. A campaign worker painstakingly showed me how to punch my ballot, the specter of “hanging chads” on everyone’s minds. (When I turned my card back in, the same worker carefully inspected it, thankfully finding it satisfactory).

Standing in the voting booth, ballot before me, elicited two responses. I first felt the weightiness of the act. Self-government takes many forms in a citizen’s life. We do not merely vote. We examine, discuss, petition, and much more. But we do vote. And in many respects, that act stands as a culmination of the others. That act declares in the most definitive way how we understand the Constitution, how we seek to realize justice. For a moment, I reconsidered my intentions. Not because I had changed my mind on who I supported or why. I did so because the consequences of the choices before me seemed real in a way I had not known.

Second, I felt peace. In the previous months, I had parsed candidate’s platforms. I had been barraged by countless (mostly attack) ads. I spent Friday and Saturday nights debating with my friends over coffee, Pepsi, and greasy breakfast food at an old diner not far from our homes. I found those experiences exhilarating. But the constant din of punditry, the persistent tension while checking poll numbers, placed this moment in stark relief. I stood alone in that booth, the rest of the world reduced to a background hum.

That peace pointed my mind to a broader, deeper one in our politics. Our campaigns have only grown more intense, fueled by our deepened differences and vituperative discourse. We despise as much as we disagree. But while we speak of elections in the language of war, we thankfully do so thus far as metaphor. For casting your ballot is a declaration for peace over battle. In the early moments of a real war—the Civil War—Abraham Lincoln declared that “ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets.” Much of human history shows human beings making decisions by the tip of a spear or the whistle of a bomb. Voting rejects that means, positing an alternative, one shorn of carnage. It shows that men may rise above the mire of accident and force to operate from deliberation and choice. Doing so is not a given for humanity. It isn’t even common. But it is part of true self-government.

On November 6, many of you will vote for the first time. I hope you, too, have engaged with other citizens regarding the issues at stake. I hope you, too, will experience the weight and the peace those moments in the voting booth still give me. Most of all, I simply ask you to vote, to choose ballots now and ever so as to reject bullets forever.