Does it matter...

There is a common complaint that arises every time an election is called. It is the whine of the isolated individual who feels that they are entirely irrelevant to the political process. It is the the voice that despairs about the power of the single vote. It goes something like this. "Why should I vote? My candidate won't win." Or like this. "Why should I vote? My party won't win." Or like this. "Why should I vote? They're all the same - in it for themselves."

Well the answer goes like this. "It all depends." It depends on whether you think that in a nation of 36 million people you can somehow expect the opinion of a single vote to immediately resonate through the system. Not likely to happen. It depends on whether you can see yourself as a member of a community. It is the communal voice that matters and that voice is created by the accumulated votes of individual citizens who understand that at best they can express their desires and hopes only in the broadest ways. The nature of democracy is that we must be willing to assign the control of our nation to the people we elect knowing that we will from time to time have the opportunity to chastise or reward them.

Is this an imperfect system? Of course it is. All human systems are imperfect not because we are imperfect but because we are complex and the role of government is to listen to the cacophony of the electoral voice and then to somehow respond in a coherent fashion. There are ebbs and flows in the political landscape as we lurch through time and space. We proceed and regress, flourish and decline. We experiment and and build. We destroy and we restore. It is the nature of our very existence and it is terribly imperfect.

And despite this we must not let ourselves to fall into the kind of nihilism that would have us abrogate the greatest gift we have as a free people. There is a simple task that each of us must undertake; we must fulfil our central role in the system we have constructed - we must vote.