Gary Brown: Making our voices heard through our votes
My mom raised her children Roman Catholic, so it is only appropriate that a quotation by the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh summed up my parents' thinking on the topic of exercising their right to vote.
"Voting," the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame once said, "is a civic sacrament."
My parents always voted. I cannot recall them ever missing an Election Day. It was their right. And it was their duty. They voted for the candidates with whom they placed the most trust, but, in a very real sense, they were voting for themselves, for their future and for the future of their children.
"The most important office," said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen."
The thought of missing a chance to cast their ballots pained my parents so much that they never considered not bothering to vote on Election Day. They took to heart the words of a president of their times.
"A man without a vote is a man without protection," said President Lyndon B. Johnson.
And, so, for their own sake and their country's good fortune, there was a continuity in their voting to be maintained. Each evening on Election Day, after my father came home from work, my parents gathered their offspring − "voters in training" − into the family station wagon and drove down to their polling place.
Making their political viewpoints known was a ritual.
"Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again," opinion columnist Peggy Noonan once wrote, "and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls."
A lighter look at voting
There are those who have made light of voting, of course.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it," Mark Twain once argued in jest.
But, by the grace of God we get to vote. Or, if you believe one humorist, maybe a diety has nothing to do with doing our civic duty.
"If God had wanted us to vote, he'd have given us candidates," comedian and former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno once comically observed.
It was humorous writer Sidney Harris who said, "Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be."
And humorist Will Rogers expressed what he thought was the end result of us doing our patriotic duty. He described it quite succinctly.
"A fool and his money are soon elected."
Comedian George Carlin, however, presented what perhaps is the most compelling argument for going to the polls on Tuesday.
"If you don't vote," Carlin said, "you lose the right to complain."
Just get out and vote
And, let's face it, we love to complain.
"I never vote for anyone," comedic actor W.C. Fields once admitted. "I always vote against."
Fortunately, voting our convictions, no matter how whiny they may sound sometimes, is cathartic for ourselves and while being helpful to our country.
"By voting," said Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, "we add our voice to the chorus that forms opinions and the basis for actions."
Voting, of course, is a tentative and error-prone process. We can make mistakes with our votes. We, as a people, are not infallible.
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon," Henry David Thoreau noted, "with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong."
During the long term, however, we need to trust our collective judgment.
"Always vote for principle," said John Quincy Adams, our country's sixth president, "though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
Other presidents have noted the importance of our votes in even stronger teams.
“We do not have government by the majority," said President Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation's founders. "We have government by the majority who participate.”
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown: Making our voices heard through our votes
