The mid-term elections are rapidly approaching and, in just a few months, the world will know whether the American people have the courage and good sense to change their government for the better or, if they have taken complete leave of their senses, driving it further into the sewer of corruption, theft, murder, and generally, all-around evil.
I am currently reading Henry David Thoreau, he of Walden Pond fame, and found this nugget of truth. In an essay, Slavery in Massachusetts1, he writes,
“The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker’s casting vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God. This is the highest principle I can get out of or invent for my neighbors. These men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down hill a little way — or a good way — and would surely come to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again. This is expediency, or choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles to the feet, that is, a downhill one. But there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of expediency. There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.”
Man, isn’t that the truth! This describes the system of voting cogently and plainly, nailing to a T the behavior of those who dutifully drop their ballot or pull a lever in favor of “the lesser of two evils”, or perhaps, as Thoreau explains, for the cause of expediency. This expediency probably stems from the individual desire to obtain something, anything, from government as a benefit, while passing the bill off onto someone else unknown.
As children, we would climb our way up a hill through the snow and, on reaching a desired height, would throw ourselves onto our sleds and enjoy the ride to the bottom and, at that point, there was nothing left to do but get up and either begin trudging back up the hill or pick up the sled and go home. As Thoreau says, there is no such thing as sliding up hill and, in the same vein, there is no such thing as voting into office righteousness, love, and morality. In voting for the lesser of the evils (why are those the only choices?), the system never gets any better, but always runs downhill, always becoming more evil.
What is required to change the course of history and the American situation? With respect to voting and choosing leaders who promise the world, but deliver mayhem, consider that you have slid downhill as far as you will go and get off. Just stop. Wherever you are.
“Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality — that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate, who is invariably the devil, — and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity — who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Indeed! What kind of man are you when you get out of bed every morning and begin a new day? That is something worth contemplating.
Thoreau has gained equal stature on my bookshelf alongside other towering heroes, Lysander Spooner and H.L. Mencken, to name a few.
I have written about this issue before and actually vowed to never go back to a particular local church because of the difference between my “truth” and theirs. See here, here, and here.
- Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, Henry David Thoreau, compiled and printed by Dover Publications, 1993, ↩︎
Poor Roger's Almanac 