Opinions

Eternal sunshine of the apathetic mind

In print | November 11, 2004

In the days leading up to the 2004 presidential election, members of the Swarthmore community called me “idiotic,” said I deserved “to be shot” and told me that they would have flooded my inbox with hate mail had not seminar work left them too little time for the adequate expression of their anger and indignation. All this abuse because I came to the deliberative conclusion that I could not in good conscience cast a vote for any of the candidates aspiring to fill the office of chief executive.

The palpable pall cast over the campus Wednesday morning by Kerry’s likely defeat and deepened by his afternoon concession afforded me a day relatively free of reprimand. What good would it do to berate a Penn-sylvania native for not throwing her infinitesimal support behind Kerry when the Keystone was among the alarmingly few blue-hued states on the ubiquitous electoral maps? Everyone was busy donning their mourning garb, identifying emigration destinations or only half-jokingly browbeating unfortunate Buckeyes for not single-handedly dropping Ohio into the lap of the Massachusetts senator. With my former lecturers thus distracted, I walked the campus unmolested, detachedly noting the length of my classmates’ faces, the eloquent dejection in their steps.

The respite, though, was a short one, and come Thursday morning I was back in the hot seat. Far from disappearing, the anger and frustration at my failure to discharge my civic duty had been augmented by a resentful awareness of my failure to partake in the collective gloom. Struck by the comparatively carefree attitude with which I faced the post-election world, friends and acquaintances leveled the charge of apathy anew. I endured the accusations — and was troubled by them.

Why wasn’t I more worried about the implications of a second Bush term? Shouldn’t my belief in a woman’s right to choose make me shudder at the thought of W’s likely Supreme Court appointments? Why had the outcome of the election not shaken my faith in the American public? Maybe I really am apathetic, I worried. Maybe what I fancied a studied objectivity was actually callous indifference. After some serious soul-searching, however, I hit upon an explanation for the mildness of my reaction to the election returns — one that just happens to suggest a means of banishing forever the debilitating depression born of disillusionment.

The trick is to be a pessimist. If you always expect the worst — I’ve been predicting that Kerry would lose his bid for the presidency at least since he picked John Edwards as his running mate — you can never be disappointed. If you assume that people in general are ignorant and thoughtless and pigheaded and herdish and (insert a favorite negative adjective here), their actions — collective or individual — can never surprise you except pleasantly. Disillusionment, then, at least in the sense of having to relinquish an ideal — a set of agreeable illusions — in the face of evidence, is impossible.

So my advice to all the disenchanted Swatties out there is this: Cozy up with some crusty curmudgeons in the mold of H.L. Mencken, convince yourself of the eternal truth of that Baltimore newsman’s opinion that “third-rate men … are in full control of the state,” and await the day when the election of a solidly second-rate individual gives your spirits an unforeseen lift.