Voting Doesn’t Really Make That Much Difference

On the other hand, participating in the process makes all the difference.

Believe it or not, that's the first thought that popped into my head this morning, when I remembered the 100+ calls I promised myself that I'd make on behalf of the campaign today.

Not that long ago, I'd have resented that prospect (in fact, I'd have resisted the whole concept) at my core: forcing myself to "bother" people by phone on behalf of a political campaign. It would've seemed too much like being an unpaid telemarketer, I would have assumed at the time.

And everybody knows that everybody hates telemarketers, paid or not.

But something funny happened to me on my way to the phone this morning.

It started about a week before the February 5th Arizona primary, in fact: way back when (at least it seems way back when, now) a month or so ago: I attended a Barack Obama rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix with my daughter Sara—and 14,000 or so of our now-close, like-minded friends that we hadn't yet met.

Then, in between explaining to Sara how and why the excitement generated by Barack's campaign reminds me of nothing so much as Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign, I realized that this campaign is fueled by the same faith — that we really can make a difference in determining the direction and destiny of our country And it asks each of us the very same question: Will we?

That was approximately the same moment that I remembered something that once seemed both crucial and obvious — but which I somehow managed to forget (or stopped wanting to remember) amid the disappointment and disillusionment I felt following the assassinations of both Martin and Bobby: That truly answering that question requires something more of us all than simply voting.

It always starts with (and centers around) hope, as Barack reminds us, but it also requires as much commitment and participation as each of us can create and sustain as citizen-subjects in the most noble political experiment ever attempted in this world: the democratic process.

That's why I started this blog with a statement that may seem to many to be such an heretical proposition — especially in the context of this reawakened citizen-activist's first blog entry at www.BarackObama.com.

Still, I hope, at least, it helps explain why I’m here and why I’m writing this — and why I need to stop writing, PDQ: Because my single vote in Arizona on February 5th really didn’t make that much difference.

On the other hand, the canvassing I did — door-to-door in my neighborhood and others, in the days after the Phoenix rally and before the Arizona primary — talking to voters, did make a difference, and a bigger one, at that.

And the calls I’ve made since, as one citizen-participant in this still-noble experiment of democracy to hundreds of my fellow citizens, has made an even bigger difference, still.

Which reminds me: I’ve got calls to make — in Rhode Island and Ohio and Texas and Vermont — while there's still time and still a difference to be made.

In fact, if you’d like to join me — and few hundred or thousand people like me — please feel free to do that.

After all, there literally are millions of people waiting to be reminded that yes, we can make it to the mountaintop — and it's still not too late to seek (and help shape) a newer, better world.