Beyond my VW’s windows

The year my car was new — 1974 — there was an off-year election in the United States. In other words, it wasn’t a presidential election. About 65% of the registered voters in San Mateo County chose their favorite candidates for Congress and state and local offices. In the previous August of that same year, several Republican leaders of Congress — good-faith participants in the democratic process, who were also members of President Nixon’s political party — went to the White House and told him he’d be facing impeachment for his actions in the Watergate scandal and that he should resign.

The next day, the president did exactly that. In his resignation speech, he said that as a nation we needed to put the bitterness and divisions of the scandal behind us, and to rediscover those shared ideals that lie at the heart of our strength and unity as a free people.

His words might have been self-serving, but viewing this as a reflection of that time compared to our own, all of this — the number of citizens voting, the leaders of the president’s own party insisting he relinquish his office — seems rather quaint, like watching an old red Beetle put-putting its way down the road.

In the off-year election primary that just occurred, barely 38% of us in San Mateo County voted — in other words, 62% of us did not. Many people have their reasons for not voting. The my-vote-won’t-make-a-difference-they’re-all-bums-I-don’t-even-know-who-the-candidates-are-there’s-too-much-money-in-politics sort of reasons. We’ve all heard these, and I’m as guilty as anyone for uttering some of them myself. Now, too, there are millions of my fellow citizens who believe that to vote is to participate in a massive fraud, and much more dangerous still, that the outcome of such elections are not to be obeyed.

But to not vote — even in our imperfect system — is to bear witness to the fatal, inexorable fading of a democracy.

I know that one more person — like me — bemoaning the dwindling participation in elections can often sound like our parents, when we were children, insisting that we eat our spinach because it was good for us. But along with that spinach they pushed in my direction, my own parents also insisted that something else was good for me. I barely noticed it at the time. But, by their continuous participation in the electoral process — even when they knew their candidate had little chance of victory — they were demonstrating that democracy has to be made each and every day: it is not a light that does not need a switch.

Michelle Obama mentioned recently how sometimes it’s easier to just look away. “But,” she said, “you can’t stay home just because you’re not feeling excited enough. If you don’t vote, other people will.”

To vote in a democracy is good for us. It bestows upon us the right to exercise our capacity to judge and to act and to be heard. Every vote matters because we are the ones making it. Our vote belongs only to us, and to no one else, and to jeopardize that — to cynically shrug off that unique right, to be indifferent to a cornerstone of democracy — is to forget what so many other human beings in this world would die attempting to protect.

Who are dying right now to protect.

My wife, JoAnneh, and I often go out to eat on Friday evenings. Several weeks ago, during the recent election, we took the ’74 red VW. At the restaurant, we happened to ask several people whether they had voted yet. None of them had and they weren’t planning on it. In fact, most of them didn’t even know who was running.

After dinner, we climbed into the VW and drove up the El Camino for awhile.

“The car sounds good,” my wife said.

“It does,” I replied.

Then I thought that I wished I could say the same about the country passing by outside the windows of the car.

Mike Nagler is a member of the Burlingame Library Board.