“Thanks for comin in,” says the avuncular election official behind gold-rimmed glasses and beneath a white Friar Tuck haircut as I slide my ballot into the machine. “Come back as soon as you’re able.”
I smile and nod. “Thanks for helpin the neighborhod,” I tell him, and I am thinking, “‘Come back soon,’ how very odd. I won’t be back for at least two years.”
I like my neighborhood, because while chances are very good that our ballots don’t look the same and we are generations apart, the election volunteer and I can exchange smiles.
At the barber shop or filling station, we might chat about the coming rain storm or the Cards’ winning football streak. I’d be faking it when it came to the local college sports teams, but he wouldn’t question or hold it against me.
It’s a community of diverse ideologies, held fast by the overriding sentiment that each of us is entitled to his opinion.
I like that, and it’s on my mind as I shake the rain out of my hair, sip my coffee, and pull away from the church that serves as our local polling place.
On a rainy election day commute to campus, soundbites from the previous day’s pre-election political sparring in the office loop in my head over NPR voting coverage.
One question skips like a bad scratch DJ, locking me in that moment, and though my eyes should be on the slick Interstate before me, they are in the back of my head considering, “Would you rather see an American or a terrorist die?”
It was an innocent question, and as I heard it, I took it as reasonable and fair considering the pattern of our trash-talking discourse, no matter how provocative it might have been.
In retrospect, however, I can scarcely shake it.
What twisted voodoo logic have the spinmeisters of our increasingly nationalistic and reactionary culture summoned that allows us to make sense of a mortal dilemma with Americans on one horn and terrorists on the other?
The loss of any life is regretful, serious, and sad, whether that of an innocent or a that of a violent criminal, such as a politically or religiously motivated terrorist. Feeling otherwise is the true mark of moral depravity. For this reason alone, the choice is repugnant even if it was offered merely rhetorically.
More though, it’s a forced comparison that just doesn’t make sense, and which relies more on nationalism and ethnocentrism than it does logic. It contains no ethnic or national bias in its text, but for its force relies heavily on the contemporary, overly-simplified, and jingoistic prejudice that terror comes only from Arabs.
It rides on the shoulders of the vast, ignorant, and racist charicature of the terrorist as a naive, camel-riding misogynist alone in the shifting sands of a great desert or as glinty-eyed and mustachioed sheikh rattling his sabre as he’s indulged by his harem.
One could ask another to compare Americans and members of another national group, say Canadians. One could ask another to compare terrorists with those who are law-abiding. This other comparison is specious and propagandistic.
If we favor hate over understanding, assuming moral and intellectual superiority based only on our nationality, then we are no different from that which we claim to fight.
If we forget that Americans Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski were terrorists, if our vast American Irish population (and I am partly and proudly of Irish ancestry) forgets that the Irish Republican movement was recently considered a terror-based campaign, if we dismiss that American Colonial Revolutionaries might have been considered by those loyal to the crown “terrorists” in today’s common parlance, we are already defeated.
If we assume that nations such as ours are incapable of commiting terrifying acts ourselves, focusing only on the violent and destructive acts of ideological criminal groups, we are assuredly doomed.
I am fortunate to have cast my ballot and moved on to the mundane toils of my day, pausing only to check the returns over my lunch hour.
I’m grateful to be able to conduct this political business with such little fuss, and I’m aware that my good fortune rests on a history of sacrifices from men and women whose names I don’t even know. I owe a lot to the accident of my American birth, and I know this must not be squandered.
My cynical and progressive friends to one side will wonder how I can be such an ignorant Pollyanna when so few real choices exist at the polling place, when one Republicrat is the same as the next Democan. My credulous and traditional friends on the other will wonder how I can know my other friends.
Commonality in spite of polarity, that’s what I like about my nieghborhood: Returns for an important Senate race in my precinct came back nearly 50/50 separated by no more than a couple dozen votes. We are split, but we are tight-knit.
It was easy for me to make my choice at the polling place, penciling my mark on the bubble sheet, but this other bogus choice and illogical comparison makes it just a little harder for me to go about my business.