Wednesday Wisdom: Election Day
Something Like The Truth, Vol. 1, Issue#3 —an Authenticity Chronicle proposal
Election Day, upon us in less than a week, is a chaotic jumble of slogans, traffic, desperate TV spots, pundits with statistics, pundits ignoring reality, desperate sleep-deprived candidates — and in 2020 includes paramilitary groups threatening, or threatening to defend against, violence. Election Day is also the orderly filing out of buses of senior citizen groups, the imposed quiet and lack of visual clutter near polling places, the hushed and reverent backroom handling of ballots, and the simple image of a written-out vote slipped into a box monitored by local leaders or village elders.
In a third-world country’s first election a few years back, I decried the corruption, the fraud, the hypocrisy of staging an “event” and calling it a democratic process, but then I watched Election Day: the elders slowly moving from bus to voting table or booth, the folding of the slip of paper, the hand tremor making the thin slot in the ballot box a challenge, the small but mighty victory of steadying one’s hand to complete the vote …….. staged or not, a shallow image perhaps, but it was a moving and important collective effort that in my cynicism I could not deny — you have to start somewhere.
