By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Party Lines
I vote for the No Villains, Heroes; Life Party this election. Two reasons:
• It doesn’t exist, as ever.
• I know my vote counts, having read last week, “Heck, even the last presidential election was decided by 21,500 votes” out of near 50 million.
Numbers are compelling. Though Joe Biden beat Donald Trump 81,268,924-74,216,124 (a 7,052,808 vote, 51.3-46.9 percent margin) which doesn’t count, 306-223 in the Electoral College which does; if you cherry-pick certain close states, add popular-vote margins (a 43,000 difference, divide by two assuming all Biden votes turn Trump in portions assigned to each state), America is being Made Great Again to this day.
Now my math education is complete, I stray from columns that:
• Abhor polarization in politics buttressed by such figures, and
• Urge we dump the Electoral College and decide by popular vote. Had we done that earlier, I’d be asking Presidents Al Gore and Hillary Clinton how that worked out.
Still, I give deference to other nonlocal issues — though I always buy local and support local newspapers —per English poet John Donne, who is 1624 wrote:
No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main …
Onto the part Ernest Hemingway conscripted:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
So I stray from Saugatuck-Douglas, home of the Wishbone House thrift shop and cat-adoption center, 25 miles east to the Allegan County Animal Shelter, run also by locally-based Wishbone Pet Rescue and linked to care for unwanted pets.
Both serve a 1,833-square-mile, 120,502-population county larger than our water-fronting “island.” All lives matter, whether my black cat or white dog, regardless where someone dumped them.
It’s easy to extol animals. They need food, water, shelter, simple things that love from another creature — their parents, maybe a human — help make possible as we keep swallowing up their habitat.
It’s easy to villainize humans too — for greed, neglect, using words and numbers to convince, not clarify. After all, that’s why we invented them. Still, I’m not ready for PETA yet.
In my line dog bites man, no story; man bites dog, story. My visits to Wishbone’s Allegan main Shelter and Douglas cat House weren’t per se asylum from human cruelty. Thrown away lives have back stories. Death and harshness are always with us.
The story holds more though. What saw too were our own capacities. Possibilities. Power and money are finite; what I have, you don’t. How do you apply math to hope and care?
Someone poisons and hangs a dog from a tree, then beats his pet with a stick. Soaks a kitten in gas and sparks her. Jeffrey Dahmer kills, cuts up and eats 17 boys just across Lake Michigan in Milwaukee.
It is easy condemning these acts. I do bad things too but feel so righteous in comparison I keep doing them. All humans, all too human. My dog poops or pees in the house, my cat leaves a bird he killed on the bed where he sleeps with me. Acts of beasts.
It’s been nonstop stupid this election cycle, same as ever. Why return there or pretend only animals are crass?
No Party I want to be part of isn’t lonely, a word one letter away from lovely. Politics turn to poetry. Numbers impose limits and articulate infinity. We miss beautiful opportunities yet take swings and at times, by intent or accident, connect.
“Why vote? All it does is encourage them?” I hear. Who’s “them”? We can all use courage.
My campaign promise is whoever we vote for will fail us. No power of office can solve humanity, nor votes confer more than confirm it. If someone runs in the Party I just made up, I will vote against them.
But I’ll show at the polls anyway. It binds me people and a country I love, despite us.
I lede — the first few words of a journalistic effort are spelled that way to distinguish them from what may expand into a lead paragraph — with a spinoff of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” opening: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” Same as ever.
If you want the best place to go, here is where you’ll be.