This article is from John Pavlovitz, the Evangelical Christian pastor who was kicked out by his congregation for preaching Christianity (he’s not the only one but may be the best known.)
I’m going to be leaning on random articles for a while, and not every day at that. This one is kind of a companion to Freya’s newest Sound Off!, but looking forward. (It had also occurred to me that we might build on these election successes, so dependent on turnout all) with variations on “See now? That wasn’t so bad/difficult/painful to vote/ We can keep doing it,” but I digress.) John’s points too are important.
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Polls don’t vote. People Do. |
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By John Pavlovitz |
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Friends, Last week was a reminder that elections aren’t won by the media, they’re won by voters. You’d think we’d have figured this out by now, watching an antiquated process that has proven over and over again in recent years to be less and less reliable in measuring the actual intentions of the electorate. In both terrible and wonderful ways, we’ve all watched the results of contests roll in and defy the prevailing narrative that ushered them in. And it isn’t simply the faulty nature of the assessment tools that’s a problem, it’s the emotional impact of them on ordinary people; of the toll of these tools on the voting population—in the hands of mainstream media outlets that in an ever-crowded landscape, strain to command the attention of the nation the way they once did. Simply put: sound, rational leadership, the kind offered by President Biden and the Democrats, is boring. Competence is boring. Emotional maturity is boring. Thoughtful discussion of complex ideas is boring. Consensus and compromise are boring. And boring is bad for business. These things don’t move the needle of mass attention, they don’t garner hits and clicks and trend. They can’t be leveraged to drive engagement and lure eyeballs and sustain urgency. For that, the media requires chaos. For that, they need the sideshow. For that, they need the sh*show. For that, they want Donald Trump and his cadre of content creators. The Republican Party is a giant human car crash: a headline-generating monstrosity that daily traffics in manufactured emergencies, culture war histrionics, unhinged rants, and abhorrent behavior. It is a regular creator of the laughably horrible that is honestly tragic for our nation’s government but riveting as performance art. What this all means, is that because we now exist in perpetually-flooded inboxes and timelines, the mainstream media will never lead with a story that is based on reasoned responses, on measured conversations, on sound policies. In these days, the steady, mature leadership of President Biden and the Democrats isn’t profitable. And ultimately what this means for us is that we need to ignore all the polls other than the ones we marshal people to, the ones we enter on those pivotal Tuesdays, the ones we collectively flip the script in. If we continue to work toward those polls, we will prevail. We will create a nation that is slowly weaned from needing its politics to entertain and become a place where terrifying crises and unnecessary drama are relegated to fiction. Last week, We the People need to remember that although we face legislative threats and Conservative assaults, for now, our voices and our choices determine our fate. And if good people organize and work and show up, we can still be the difference in the day. It can be boring but beautiful. Be encouraged.
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GBS (George Bernard Shaw) and GKC (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) were British intellectuals of the early (roughly first quarter of the) 20th century. Shaw was an atheist, Chesterton a convert too Roman Catholicism. There’s a story that once they encountered eaxh other and Chesterton said, “Shaw, anyone who saw you might think there was a famine in England,” and Shaw replied, “And anyone looking at you might think he had found the cause of it. Shaw was a lifelong bachelor, Cwesterton a devoted husband. Clearly they had little in common. But there was one thing (at least) on which they agreed.
