Suffering Sufferage

What would make you change your mind?

As you may know, voting is compulsory for people over 18 in Australia. I’m sure there are some democraphiles out there for whom enrolling to vote is exciting. At 18, I wasted no time getting my license, buying a case of beer and a deck of ciggies but enrolling wasn’t at the top of my list. Without wanting to out myself as a poll dodger, I’ll just say it took me a few years to get around to it. Not out of apathy but possibly laziness. I’d like to think I wasn’t simply justifying my laziness when I started thinking the whole idea of party politics was irrational and kind of dangerous. I prefer thinking about being liberal or conservative as verbs – something you can do, rather than as nouns – someone you can be. There are times for each, often in tandem and not in binary.

I’ve been voting for several years now. Impressive, I know, but hero is a strong word. It’s more inconvenient than not voting – that’s probably my biggest takeaway. Also, that I’m yet to feel confident in my choices or to like my options. It’s hard working out whom I dislike the least and what handful of issues impact my life enough to sway my vote. Typically, there are two viable candidates – at least middle-aged, almost always white and male, a little left of centre or a little right. Whether it’s true or not, my impression is they will spend most of their time politicking – navigating special interest groups and tactical partisanship, rendering them mostly ineffective. So I do what I am obliged to and try to avoid conversations with my more politically-minded friends and family of which there are few, thankfully.

But it’s been on my mind lately. For something different, politicians seem to matter at the moment, wielding enormous powers over many aspects of daily life. I don’t know what the state premiers used to do but it certainly wasn’t deciding when I can leave the house, for what, and for how long. Some of us have had very strong and unwavering opinions of these things from the very beginning while for others it has depended on the day or the year... Certainly, each of us is affected differently depending on the nature of our work or of the home we have been locked down in, our personalities, our health… There are too many variables. I think we can all agree the worst kind of conversation right now involves people explaining why their suffering is worse than yours. My next favourite is that relative or friend or the guy in the dog park who is desperately searching for someone to unburden themselves on – baiting you with dangerous, probing questions and ready to pounce. Angry ranting has been more infectious and more hazardous than Delta.

I would very much like to be out of lockdown. I was for it originally, ambivalent for a while and now long over it. Partly it’s my tolerance levels and my wellbeing, my bank balance and also the vaccine. I exercise my right to change my mind regularly, to employ liberalism and conservatism and everything between and beyond them as needed because I’m capable of such feats of discretion.  I suspect if we were to go to the polls tomorrow for a state election, many people would be voting based on their opinion of how the premiers and their parties have handled the pandemic. Forgetting how unscientific most of our opinions are likely to be, it’s also not part of the usual job description. I can hear my mum saying, ‘yeah Dan, but it’s about how they treat people and what they stand for’ – the circumstances will change but the values won’t. Maybe. But also maybe, our view of their values or how they treat people has to do with our values and our ideology and the journalists and friends that we listen to.

Too many of us are down in the trenches lobbing mortars as though we’re not all just figuring things out, doing our best, right sometimes, wrong sometimes and often unlikely to know for sure. So, guy in the carpark near my local surf beach, you’ve been warned, I’m not a political abstraction. I think a lot of different things. Dan, Scott, Gladys, you, me… we’re all a bit shit some of the time and really, that’s why we vote - so we don’t have to deal with anyone’s shit for too long. Churn baby! So don’t get too comfortable.