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The
Spirit’s in the Details
‘These
pages are for us. They’re just a formality.”
My local Democratic committeepeople came to my door a few
days ago gathering the signatures needed to put various candidates
on the ballot.
This is an important and moderately thankless job for which
I commend them. I realize that when you’ve served for a long
time in an elected capacity that few people pay attention
to and for which there is little competition it’s easy to
think of it as a formality. I certainly remember the temptation
to roll my eyes a little when it came time to vote on the
candidates for my church board, after the nominating committee
had spent anxious hand-wringing weeks trying to find enough
people willing to fill the positions at all.
That said, it irks me to hear any part of our democratic process,
as flawed as it is, written off as a formality. The yes-or-no
no-rival-candidates plebiscite “votes” that dictators hold
so they can say they’ve been elected are formalities. The
Democratic primaries in Michigan and Florida this year were
formalities, and the voters there weren’t any too pleased
about it. (Josh Eisenstein, in a column for the Huffington
Post, made a convincing argument that if Hillary had taken
the high road and called for revotes in those states she would
have given herself a strong enough image as a leader committed
to integrity and fairness to have won.)
Unless something is actually preventing anyone from running
against you, however, gathering signatures to get on the ballot
as a committeeperson, on the other hand, is not a formality.
You can actually be left off the ballot if you don’t do it.
It’s also a small reminder that even if no one has run against
you in a while, you are, in the words of another local Albany
committee person, “elected officials who are supposed to represent
our neighborhoods to the party, not the other way around.”
Grumping this much about a throwaway comment may seem like
I’m saying that lip service to principles matters. Maybe I
am. There’s a great Marge Piercy line: “A ritual of unity
makes some of what it pretends.” Sometimes you have to talk
like something matters before you really find yourself acting
that way.
Sure, there are plenty of people who can actively doublespeak
forever, saying noble things and never meaning them. They
have some of the most powerful positions in our government
and business world. But for many of the rest of us, taking
the little things seriously is like the gentle wind that makes
seedlings grow stronger so they’ll have a better chance against
the storm. It’s hard to fight the big fights when you’ve opted
out of every little fight.
Take, for example, the pervasive assumption that no one reads
the fine print and no one should, they should just trust the
software maker/pharmaceutical company/cell phone company/mortgage
broker. This has made it easy to make longer and longer contracts
and more and more convoluted legalese that the average person
actually can’t take the time to read and understand, even
if they decide to try stand on the principle of “Always read
the fine print.”
At this point there are software programs that will scan the
license agreements we all click through for things like declaration
of intent to mine your data or install spyware on your computer
or disable competing apps.
I challenge you, if you ever buy a house, to try to read all
the documents you sign at closing. You might want to bring
bribes to keep everyone in the room from blowing their stacks
with frustration.
And that’s biting our economy in the ass right about now.
Because those subprime adjustable rate mortgages that are
now resetting away from their low introductory rates to much
higher ones their borrowers can’t afford did in fact have
those terms spelled out in their contracts. Contracts that
were treated like formalities but were not. In many, many
cases their basic terms and the financial implications of
those terms were never actually explained or even disclosed
to the borrower. These cases may not fall under the scope
of the FBI’s “Operation Malicious Mortgage” (oh, where were
you three years ago, FBI?), but the results are arguably similar.
And so even when it seems like a formailty, I think it’s a
good exercise to make a point of periodically sticking up
for a principle when not a lot is at stake. Surely, you and
I don’t have time to actually read all the fine print we encounter
in our daily lives, nor to actually research the politics
and positions of every member of, say, the proposed slate
of New York state Democratic committee members. But we should
never let ourselves believe, or say, or be told, that we’re
not doing it because it’s not worth doing.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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