We just received our General Election Voter Information Guide in the mail yesterday. Inside are ten propositions that will be on the California ballot on Nov. 5th, with 134 pages explaining them. At a quick glance – and by quick I mean thirty minutes spent reading the Quick Reference Guide – I found only two propositions on which I know for sure how I’ll vote.
Two out of ten, decided in half-an-hour, with the potential for hours and hours of more research to find the things that might be hiding in clever language and behind murky motives.
There were a lot of elections in the nineties and early 2000s when I just didn’t vote. I was busy working, living life with roommates, friends, the occasional boyfriend, and mostly managing to pay my bills on time. Bond measures for school repairs were completely immaterial to my life, and how much the property taxes were on a home I didn’t own didn’t matter. I’m not proud of not voting back then, I’m just saying that I understand when politics feel irrelevant to daily life, and when who or what to vote for feels like too much work (134 pages for ten California propositions – I’m looking directly at you).
Even when I started voting regularly, I mostly skipped the judges elections. My mom once ran for judge, so I did understand the importance of choosing carefully. It just never occurred to me that one judge could be dramatically different than another, given that they were all lawyers, and all had some degree of experience, right?
Except now I know better. Now I know that some judges don’t just interpret the law, they actually use the bench to make it, overriding the will of the representatives who were elected by the people to make laws, and in fact, the will of the people themselves. And some judges will lie to get the job, saying that something like Roe v. Wade is inviolate and they’d never vote to overturn it, and yet they did so at the first opportunity which could be manufactured.
Self-interest plays a huge part in politics, and anyone who says differently is either sweetly naïve, dangerously deluded, or determined to manipulate. Recognizing and acknowledging our own self-interest is probably the first step toward breaking 134 pages of explanations into manageable bites. It also gives us a place from which to begin the process of choosing the people we think can best represent our self-interest.
My personal self-interest pretty much begins and ends with my kids. That’s a massive oversimplification obviously, especially because people on the opposite side of the political aisle from me could probably argue the same. Where my self-interest might differ from theirs is that I start with a belief in my kids’ fundamental right to freedom – the freedom to be, and love, and identify whatever, whomever, and however they believe is right for them. My beliefs in access to an excellent public education, healthcare, food and shelter place me firmly in a socialism camp, but in a developed, first-world nation, it seems unreasonable to me that these aren’t fundamental rights. Human history shows us that people who moved from hunting and gathering to a rooted agrarian society in a climate warm and dry enough to grow and store crops achieved food surpluses, which in turn, allowed for specializations in technology, healthcare, building, and the arts. In short, civilizations grew from a culture of meeting basic needs.
Ironically, it was Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government that came up with the Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the 1980s in the UK, which gave entrepreneurs a weekly income for a year while they got their businesses off the ground. British musicians and artists were able to use that time to create lasting art, and more than 65% of the people who began businesses during that period went on to create jobs for other people. It was a job creation program that didn’t rely on family wealth or inherited opportunity. And isn’t it interesting that the true “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” opportunities have historically come from something as socialist as State support?
I didn’t actually mean to slip down the side road of universal basic income, when really, this post is all about voting. And yet there are some common threads to the thoughts. A government that works for the people who vote it in place is there to serve the self-interests of the greatest numbers of its constituents. My self-interests are around freedom and education and healthcare, with access to basic minimums for all. My friends don’t agree with me 100%, but there is enough agreement between us that I feel I can trust their assessments of propositions and candidates who meet their own self-interest requirements. If enough people with self-interests similar to ours get together to vote for the same people and policies, those policies and people will begin to reflect our self-interests.
In that regard, government has the ability to become a self-feeding, self-fulfilling structure of support for the people it serves. But only if enough people recognize the people and policies that support their self-interests, and then enough of those people actually get out and vote.
So I’m going to propose this to my friends, and I propose the same to you – let’s hang out together, maybe at your house, maybe at mine, or maybe at the library when the League of Women Voters does their thing with local candidates (I LOVE my local League of Women Voters – they host the best candidate forums!). Let’s take that 134 page pamphlet that explains the 10 propositions, and let’s break it down. I’ll take one or two, you take one or two, and when they’re all divided up, let’s read up, research, and learn exactly what those propositions will bring to our tables and homes and schools and cities and States.
Then let’s get together again, maybe at my house, maybe at yours, or maybe at the library when the local candidates are telling us why we should vote for them, and let’s talk about how one or two propositions affect our own self-interests. If we each educate ourselves on a couple of things on the November 5th ballot, and then we really talk to each other about what we’ve learned, we’ll discover all the ways in which our self-interests converge and we’ll share the work to educate a community about how our governments can work for us.
I guess what I’m saying is that government isn’t really supposed to work on individuals. The idea of “what are you doing for me” isn’t what drives the concept of government, because it’s only really useful or available in a rooted, agrarian society with a surplus of food, where individuals are freed up from the need for daily survival tasks by the labor of other individuals who work for the collective needs. It is that, and only that, which allows us all to learn and practice specialized skills instead of hunting and gathering our daily food. By its very definition, society is a community of people, and when we, as members of that community, take the time to talk to each other, share our self-interests, and contribute to the conversation and education about the things that affect us all, we will discover that our voices – which are just noise when every tries to speak at once – become intelligible, focused, and powerful when they’re all saying the same thing.