Letter to the Editor
Editor,
The article below was taken from http://www.starhawksblog.org/ . It has been modified only slightly to speak to our local community. The American references were removed. My goal is to share the wisdom of this blogged piece not to plagiarize it.
“We’re getting close to our October elections. Why vote? It is vitally important that you do, and here’s three good reasons why: the practical, the political, and the spiritual.
Practically speaking, there is one arena where your vote absolutely makes an enormous difference—and that’s on local issues. Granted, national politics are enough to discourage anyone from getting out of bed, let alone dragging yourself down to the polling station. But locally, even a few votes can make a huge difference. In the Municipality of Meaford, elections are often decided by a handful of votes. Our Municipal Council controls vitally important decisions that impact land use, water use; issues that directly affect our lives. Local councils can decide to run buses on biodiesel made from used restaurant grease. Our local school board representative can work towards keeping our local high school open.
Hate fracking? One of the most successful strategies to stop it has been getting local towns to ban it. Care about climate change? Then care about local public transport, urban food growing, community gardens and farmers’ markets which are all subject to local regulation. Want to legally re-use your gray water? Want programs to teach youth to grow and eat healthy food? Want schools that teach critical thinking, that have programs for art and music, which have curriculums that reflect diversity? All of these issues come back to the local, where your vote does make a difference!
Okay, if that isn’t enough to persuade you, here’s a political argument for those of you who consider yourselves too disillusioned or revolutionary to engage in anything as reformist as voting:
That’s a position of pure privilege.
Why? Because deep systemic change may take a little while to get underway, but it starts at the local level. In the meantime, all those reformist half-measures do have a huge impact on real peoples’ lives, often the people with the least resources and who are most impacted by policies. They might determine things like whether or not someone goes to jail for life for a petty drug offense, or whether a pregnant teen can get the support she needs if she wants to keep her child. They determine whether old people can keep the pensions they worked for or whether corporations pay taxes.
And no, they never work perfectly, or make the deep, structural changes we might like to see. But even incremental change can make the difference between life and death for someone.
And when the right wing is working so hard to take control, why on earth would you want to help them?
And now, the spiritual reasons:
Why not vote to honor the ancestors. The women who campaigned for years to get the right to vote. How can we turn up our noses at the rights for which others worked so hard and sacrificed so much?
Ah, you say, but politics are so ugly, so nasty and conflictual and such a low vibration. Won’t I sully my spiritual purity and disturb my inner peace by getting involved?
If your inner peace has any depth to it, it will withstand a trip to our now virtual voting booth. True spirituality is not about some aseptic removal from the world, it’s about engagement with reality in all its forms. True compassion requires us to face what’s ugly and disturbing, not hide from it. Withdrawal is, again, a position of pure privilege. Privilege means advantages and power and choices that you haven’t earned, and exercising unearned power never earned anyone any karmic good points.
The farmer whose land is taken for a pipeline doesn’t have the luxury of denial. The community whose drinking water is toxic from a chemical spill is looking for a very practical form of purity. They need our solidarity, which is the wonderful use we can make of privilege – to put it to the service of making a more just world.
Finally, it’s a magical law that you don’t gain more power by disdaining the power you have. If we want to call in the great powers of creation, compassion and justice to transform our world, we must use whatever avenues are open to us, even if they seem weaker than we’d like. The trickle carves a path for the stream to flow, and the stream makes the way for the river.
So do a walking meditation, and walk on down to one of the voting welcome centres or use you phone or computer. Make filling out your ballot an act of prayer, if you like.
Take that hour, or day out of your busy life and make your small voice heard as an act of magical, political will that can open the gates to a world where we all have bigger voices. When you go back to your meditation, or your anarchist collective, or your revolutionary praxis, or your simple struggle to pay the rent and put food on the table, the world will not have transformed overnight. The Great Turning won’t have turned. The Good Guys will not have completely triumphed over the Bad Guys.
But the world might just be a slight bit better than it would have been otherwise. And that small difference might be the divergence in the path that heads us away from destruction and onto the road to hope.”
Lindy Iversen, Meaford
