Anxiety About Voting

The issue of the American presidential election is grand, momentous. We Americans feel we are faced with an immense, weighty, crucial decision. Yet the candidates do not put the issue clearly before us and we ourselves cannot make the issue clear to ourselves. We know  only that Donald Trump’s character and abusive actions towards women and minorities may not allow us to vote for him and so maybe we should vote for Hillary Clinton even though her long past experience as a Washington political insider will not take America in some new better direction. The candidates are both flawed and their words now in the days just before the election no longer seem even vaguely relevant to the deep emotional tension we all of us feel that has strangely nothing to do with the candidates. We are sick of listening to them. We know we are not voting for any real political issue and yet we all feel that the result of our individual decisions will be fatal for us in our future in a way that for some reason we have never felt in the past in a presidential election. Some of us hear in our minds words from the Irish poet Yeats, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”...”The center cannot hold”...”Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But no words correspond to our anxiety. We are facing something dangerous and alarming. We do not know what it is and even if we did know, we know our vote will not do anything to help us. So we are alone and abandoned politically and psychologically and no one and nothing can change the tension we feel. The only relief is to go into a voting booth and do something. We need to act politically even though we fear that neither Trump nor Clinton will act politically for us. If we knew that Clinton or Trump as president will be forced to keep a hold on the center and keep the world from anarchy by supporting the worldwide designs for power and riches of the best and the worst on our planet, it would only increase our anxiety. It’s better not to think of the world and do our best to deal with the anxiety caused by our political impotency in America.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Read Chapter 3 of his novel The End of all Beginnings at: www.usoftheworld.com/fiction