More wisdom about voting

I am a Christian person, so I think of the Gospel in precisely these terms. The world gives us a million false and contradictory stories about the nature of reality, and each of us (for our own reasons) believes a few of them. (Nobody could believe all of them). The Gospel comes along and says, “Forget about all those other stories. Here’s the story you’re actually living in.” And in the truest story, you don’t have to be afraid, or proud, or self-indulgent, or self-protective. You don’t have to be right. You can say “Oh, what a fool I’ve been.” Then, for the first time, you can stop being such a fool. You don’t have to be the boss. You don’t have to be a victim. You don’t have to jealously guard whatever power you have managed to consolidate. You don’t have to find your sense of self in your race or your gender or your social class or your political leanings. You don’t have to be the hero of the story. You don’t even have to be the main character.

But if the best stories awaken you to the larger, truer story in which you find yourself, there are other stories that shrink your world. These stories convince you that you need to be afraid, that you are a victim, that if you don’t hold tightly to your power or your rights (or, alternatively, if you don’t scrap for more power and more rights), you are doomed, along with everybody you love, and the “other” will triumph over you. These stories try to convince you that you are surrounded by enemies. The villains in these stories are so one-dimensional, the us-and-them dynamics so oversimplified and stereotypical that you would never tolerate them in a work of fiction; you’d throw the book across the room. And yet somehow we let these melodramas shape our sense of what kind of world we live in.

When I look around our political landscape, I feel a little nostalgic for an era when Orwell’s “long words and exhausted idioms” could have seemed like a major threat to democracy (if, indeed, such an era ever existed). Much more serious are the threats posed by very specific, very concrete stories that lie about who we are and how we fit into the world—stories that lie about our fellow human beings, most of whom are just doing the best they can to get along in a world that can be pretty hard to get along in.

Today is election day in the United States. I don’t know what your options are where you live. Some districts have better options than others. But whatever you choose, I hope you don’t choose it because some politician has stirred up your fear and outrage, then offered himself up as the solution to your fear and outrage. We’ve got to start telling better stories—not for the sake of wishful thinking, but because the better stories are true.

You live in a better story than the ones the world is telling you. Take courage.