Infinite MonkeysSaturday night I was sitting talking with friends after a great dinner at Paul Lee's Chinese Kitchen (don't believe the reviews - we loved it - the Kung Pao Scallops were superlative!). I was expressing the sort of eerie dead calm that I feel with the election looming so close. Sure, things are still happening, and the pundits are still inpundating, but I feel a sort of a let down. I haven't been blogging much and I've been busy (besides cycling) trying to be a good teacher / administrator and a good husband and father (which includes church functions). Subsequently, I don't feel like I've had the impact I could have in this election. Yes, I know I'm a small fish in a very big pond. It's not about delusions of grandeur. It's about the one-voter-at-a-time persuasion that I feel I just haven't been effective at this go around. (My season has not been completely without some folks in my sphere coming around, but they've been the long term, indirect kind of conversions. It's not like I've had friends rushing political altar-calls.)
But as the campaign draws to a close, I find myself not having donated to worthy candidates until it hurt. Which makes me uncomfortable as all I can do is sit and watch in these last few hours. I haven't signed up for the 96-hour volunteer push, nor have I arranged my schedule to allow for such hours of service. Again, as I sit these last few hours, I feel a faint but nagging sense of regret amplified by worry. No matter how the poll numbers summarized at RealClearPolitics ought to assuage me, I worry. I remember feeling this before the election in '92. And that feeling went on for Eight. Years. I wish I had remembered it more clearly earlier in these last months.
Contemplating this, I stumbled upon a theory. Perhaps it's not just the fact that the octogenarians in our midst have nothing else to do, or are trying to earn points according to some social gospel as they approach the end of life. No, perhaps it's that these folks have lived through enough elections like the ones I have just described. Elections after which the feelings of regret over not having done enough have mounted, one upon another over all these years. So now they man the phones, stuff the envelopes, train the fresh college kids, staffing the polling places, etc.
I think I'll look at these folks a little differently now*... and hope that it doesn't take me that long to learn their lessons.
*Obviously, my experience in what The Onion described as likely "the ugliest, dingiest, most depressing building in a three-mile radius" and with the performance of its inhabitants those staffing it may very well diffuse my goodwill and forward-looking optimism.