If You Read Anything Before Election Day, Please Read This: The Antidote to Apathy

You’ve seen about 90% of your Facebook newsfeed dedicated to the quasi-apocalyptic importance of Election Day tomorrow. Countless memes of Romney’s “binders of women” and Obama’s “horses and bayonets”. And maybe, just maybe — your newsfeed makes you want to shut it all down. Turn it all off. And truthfully: you’re not alone.

The ironic thing is that you start to see an unintentional breakthrough in our country’s main two party political system. A new subset of Facebook status updates emerges, and it goes something like this: “I don’t care about the election.”; “Our political party system is broken & I don’t like any of the candidates who are running — my vote won’t make a difference anyway.”; “Is there something going on tomorrow? Meh.”

So, it seems, somewhat inadvertently —  a third major party has actually been created. And it’s called: The Voter Apathy Party.

And yes, this has already been created on Facebook (luckily, it only has 149 likes):

I recently saw a great TED talk given by Dave Meslin, entitled “The Antidote to Apathy.” I can supposedly vouch for Meslin’s non-partisan point of view on American politics, since he is a resident of Toronto, Canada. And the talk was recorded 2 years ago, and is not focused on electoral politics here in America. In Meslin’s speech, he identifies the origins of apathy coming from psychological collectivism.

Meslin cites 7 examples about how mainstream society reinforces people to not be engaged — in other words, people are being intentionally excluded.

For example, notices and advertisements about being engaged in your community is, well, often hard to find, and are generally not presented in a way that is very inspiring. Meslin cleverly points out, what if the private sector advertised in the same way?

His lecture gave me these points to ponder:

1. Civic engagement is not being presented as something vital that really impacts the quality of our lives. Putting in the effort to getting involved often feels like someone is hiding the ball, and there quite simply isn’t an active culture of inclusivity and fostering creative, community-building ideas.
2. Public advertising for “free” speech often goes to the highest bidder, and the most important messages are many times not going to be displayed.
3. Your favorite local magazine advertising the new restaurant down the street has information about where to get the food: the address, phone number, etc. But what about a political article within that same magazine about a hotly contested local supervisor race? Is there any contact information for the campaign? What about how to get involved? 
4. Hollywood often creates these myths of leaders being “chosen” or needing to 100% successfully rise to the occasion each and every time. The truth is that building positive change in our communities is going to take real people. People like you and me. 
   
5. Let’s be honest, political organizations aren’t always putting bold and fresh ideas on the table. And that breeds cynicism.

Think about the plethora of day-to-day things we engage with that reinforce passive disengagement. We are being trained as a society to be standing on the sidelines of our own community issues. Political issues. Election issues.

So — it’s important to recognize that there are some understandably huge mainstream societal roots when it comes to feeling apathetic about Election Day. The solution truly does lie, as Meslin says, in redefining apathy as a system that reinforces disengagement. The next steps are to identify these factors, and then dismantle them.

So, where does that leave us for the immediate purpose of Election Day coming up in T-24 hours?

What that comes down to is simply: a personal choice. A choice to recognize that you are not a passive actor in your own life, family, circle of friends, community, town, city, state, or nation. Choosing to acknowledge that there is a culture of active oppression and disengagement, and it falsely teaches us that apathetic people are selfish, stupid, and lazy. This only further perpetuates the problem.

John Donne was on to something when he remarked that “no man is an island.” And there is a lot of work to be done to disprove the false narrative that the human species operates as separate units rather than a whole.

So, what just is the first step to dismantling apathy? Perhaps it lies here.

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