(N.B.: Datestamp is overly precise; I only know this was written sometime during the college application process.)

For UoC, CMU, WU, CWRU

If the purpose of studying history is to learn from the mistakes made by our predecessors, the purpose of studying current events is to avoid the errors of our contemporaries. I fear that we do not read our newspapers as critically as we read our textbooks. “President's strategy, charisma defeat Dole,” the Chicago Tribune announced on the front page of its November 6 edition. Sure, Dole was defeated in the presidential election. Everyone had known it was coming. What about the greater issue? More important than Dole's demise was the fact that voters stayed away from polling places in record numbers. I had to look to the editorial pages to find this year's regularly scheduled post-election reprimand: “The right to vote is a responsibility.”

A budding linguist, I like to scan newspaper articles for grammatical and semantic errors. The imprecision of the title's expression disturbed me, because an opinion riddled with careless language is often an opinion founded on careless logic. A right is often accompanied by responsibility, to be sure, but while the two are not mutually exclusive they are certainly not synonymous. I read further with frenzied interest, a hungry predator circling helpless prey, lacking the patience to ingest each word alone, knowing the outcome in advance: this was another of those “not voting is irresponsible and runs counter to the founding principles of our nation” editorials. And I knew where I stood on those.

Four years ago that week, you would have found me in a middle-school history classroom spouting the same rhetoric. That's what I was taught, of course: when I got to be eighteen someday, I should vote because I lived in a country where I was allowed to. Later, spurred by the self-questioning approach of my high school history teacher, I started thinking critically about the nature and meaning of rights. What sort of right is voting, if it must be exercised? The right to vote is really an extension of the right to choose. And one can choose not to choose.

For most voters, the choice in the presidential election fell between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, two consummate politicians and two seriously flawed human beings. Most voters chose one of these two candidates. For me, it's hard to determine the reason. No, I am not a Perotian or a Green Party adherent. I am that rare idealist who intends to see his ideal in action, and none of this year's candidates was ideal, or even good. Each was inconsistent in his ideology and each failed to discuss important issues. Each wanted us to overlook his character flaws (for Dole, his questionable dealings with, for example, Archer Daniels Midland; for Clinton — need I explain further?) and vote for him anyway. They played the media game, each in his own way, hoping to put the right spin on every word.

What am I getting at? A vote, because it is given on the basis of a single person's thought and action, has immense intrinsic value. In this sense — though the Tribune did not intend to convey this sense — the editorial's title was right. A vote is not rightly given to the least offensive candidate; it is rightly given to the most promising. A vote is not protection from minority rule; it is an affirmation of personal freedom. A vote is an unqualified positive by its nature and should be exercised as such, given only when its recipient deserves it completely. A person who votes for a seriously flawed candidate perpetuates a flawed system and, in so doing, defiles his vote. The proper vote in an election such as this is no vote at all.

This is not to say that I advocate apathy. Far from it. I think people ought to value their votes so highly that they refuse to spend them on unworthy politicians, instead demanding good ones in order that they can vote their consciences. I, for one, though I am not yet of the age when I can choose to do so, would have uncast my vote in a call for better people in positions of leadership. Perhaps, someday, I will answer my own call.