Election Day A Celebration of The Right to (Maybe) Get it Wrong

Today is elec­tion day, a day which is, as far as I’m con­cerned, the clos­est thing the sec­u­lar world has to a Catholic holy day of obligation.

I know that rise in early vot­ing makes that atti­tude moot to some degree but for me, elec­tion day remains sacred.

These days part of it is sen­ti­men­tal, After she retired my mother used to work the polls and the very last time I vis­ited her at home was elec­tion day 2012. She looked ter­ri­ble and I offered to drive her to the polls if she wished to vote. She strug­gled to her feet and I walked with her to my car. When she got to the polling sta­tion, there was no room to park and she insisted on get­ting out her­self. The moment she left the car (and was offi­cially in pub­lic) it was as if a switch was turned. She was sud­denly her­self and strode into the school, 15 min­utes later she crisply walked out hav­ing greeted her for­mer co-​workers after vot­ing and exchang­ing some small talk and got back into the car. It wasn’t until I had pulled out of the school park­ing lot that she allowed real­ity to reassert itself and she once again became the frail woman who would be dead in less than 40 days.

This atti­tude con­cern­ing vot­ing is not con­fined to my fam­ily In 2016 I told the story of a hand­i­capped friend who I took to the polls:

I got to his place at 8:45 AM. It took him an hour to get dressed, a solid 10 – 12 min­utes to hob­ble on his crutches to my car, over 30 min­utes to go into the polling place and vote and another 10 min­utes to hob­ble up the stairs back to his apart­ment and prac­ti­cally throw him­self back onto his bed at 10:45 (after a bank trip too) in incred­i­ble pain.

He did so to vote for Don­ald Trump in Mass­a­chu­setts a state where the pres­i­den­tial race was not even remotely in doubt.

The right of the com­mon peo­ple to make their own deci­sion about who rules them on the local, coun­try, state and fed­eral level has been a rare and pre­cious thing through­out his­tory which is why I never miss and elec­tion but there is a 2^nd right that is no less pre­cious that is exer­cised on elec­tion day…the right to be wrong.

That right was aptly demon­strated to me a few hours after I drove my mother to the polls in Boston at the Rom­ney Cam­paign HQ “vic­tory” part as I watched the media grow happy and the crowd grow mis­er­able at a result that given the pre­vi­ous four years seemed unbe­liev­able to me:

Appar­ently it’s going to have to get a lost worse before it gets bet­ter, and the peo­ple decided on the can­di­date who will cer­tainly make it worse.

We con­ser­v­a­tives will have to dou­ble our efforts to teach but the results of the next four years under Barack Obama will do that more effec­tively than any­thing else.

Expe­ri­ence keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other. Get ready Amer­ica you are about to have a four-​year course on the joys of social­ism with a pres­i­dent who no longer has an incen­tive to pre­tend he is any­thing but the rad­i­cal he has always been.

And he did, iron­i­cally cre­at­ing the con­di­tions which finally caused enough Amer­i­cans in enough states to cry enough four years later result­ing in the Trump pres­i­dency and the pros­per­ity that we enjoy now.

That free mar­ket of ideas, like a free mar­ket econ­omy is self cor­rect­ing and that free­dom to get it wrong and to bear the results of that wrong deci­sion is not only the best way to get things right in the long term but it is the only way to assure that we remain a free repub­lic instead of serfs liv­ing in ser­vice to our “betters”.

A free soci­ety always gets the gov­ern­ment, good or bad, that it deserves so no mat­ter the result today let’s cel­e­brate our right to hold our head up high and dance

, or to bend over and be paddled…

…secure in the knowl­edge that in either case, it’s the choice we have freely made for ourselves.