Baracking the Vote

These past few weeks have had me make certain decisions about the way I interact with others in the world, how I make my performance and present my Me. For the first time in my life our country is involved in an election that I actually have a strong investment in the outcome either way (at least at the outset, we had no idea how terrible George Bush could be at the beginning). This has energized my political impetus to a large extent and initially pushed me towards being interested in working for the Barack Obama campaign, because he was such a compelling personality and I think is one of the most effective role takers in politics today.

Role-taking and performance in fact seems to be the heart of what politics is, making the entire political work one large sociology case study. In his campaign Obama successfully showed that he could take on the role of average Americans and inspire trust in them because he knew what it was like to be them.

But to get back to my point, after becoming energized about the campaign I had to decide what role I wanted to play. I realized that the identity that I wished to possess most in this period was not one of a participant in the campaign process, but as a participant in the voting process. I have never been so excited or proud to be a voter and I wanted to be able to tell that story about myself, now and in the future, more than being a participant in the campaign. Thusly I have done everything I can to become and informed voter and make my decision according the data that is available.

This is an interesting step for me along the continuum of my political identity. With each major stage in my life I have associated myself with a different political ideology. When I was in high school I was extremely politically active and somewhat radical in my ideology, looking to anarchism or socialism (I saw them as two sides of the same coin) as a solution to our broken democracy. After high school I became disillusioned by the process following the reaction to September 11th and the invasion or Iraq, which caused the onset of political apathy. This identity of apathy was actually wrapped up in a reaction to the identity that many Americans seemed to be holding onto at that point, which was mainly focus on Us vs. Them, for our God against your God, and there’s no middle ground. This kind of belief and identity role scared me to such an extent that I tried to excise the idea of being an American from my mind. I felt that that part of my identity had been hijacked by others, that what I had thought was a significant symbol in my symbolic interaction with others (especially foreigners) had become a very mutable and inconsistent symbol.

In the last few weeks of the election and after casting my vote today I feel exhilaration in my identity. I am a voter, I am an American, I did my constitutional part to bring change to this country and to make the American identity something that I wish to associate with myself. I can only hope that the rest of the electorate also wishes for America herself to act according to her Me instead of her I.