Election day is the most romantic day of the year for me. I know how that sounds—what a nerd it makes me.  But it’s true.  I have a whole recipe folder of foods I make for election day.  I’m not a party animal, but election night is the one time I open my house and invite everyone I know to come over for food and conversation.  I am as eager for it to arrive as Christmas.  

It is romantic because I'm in love with the democratic process.  The whole nation pauses and listens to what the people say.  

Are elections always fair?  Of course not.  Do voters always make the smartest choice?  Not even half the time. Are political campaigns even rational?  Nope.

So, you ask, “What’s the romance about?”  Romance is the capacity to pour grace over some of the facts in order to keep a good thing going.  It is a good thing that we use ballots instead of bullets to decide who leads.  It is also a good thing that some fragment of the people decides, rather than a dictator or an invading army.  The lynchpin of democracy, and the most romantic scene in every election comes when the defeated candidate graciously concedes and wishes the winner well, even if cheating is suspected.  

Part of the romance of voting is that we get better leaders by moving on to the next election, working to outsmart the other side in a rematch.  If you want to be a winner next time, you can’t pout and point fingers and pontificate afterward.  You must outwork and outthink your opponent.  History proves that it isn’t all that hard to get the public to follow, which is sad in a way, but also important to know.

Those electioneering have been working overtime for next week’s vote.  There’s a guy running in my district whose number one priority is to control women, according to his opponent. According to him, the other candidate secretly plans to increase our gas tax.  A guy in Oklahoma believes his opponent is set on letting cannibals out of prison.  Apparently hundreds of candidates around the country hate America.  They plan to import criminals from around the world while simultaneously plotting ruin for economy.  Other candidates are said to be the masterminds behind school shootings, racism, and destroying the environment.  Not a single trick-or-treater tomorrow night will have a costume scarier than the candidates running, if the ads are to be believed.

I have voted in twenty-five federal elections.  Reading the stories and history of elections has been a life-long source of pleasure.  I get hyped at election time, feasting news, polls, stories, and speculations-- months before the actual voting.

But this year I’m on a political diet.  There will be no party at my house.  Oh, I can still tell you more about races all over the state and country than most people.  But certain shifts in how we do politics have been affecting my health.  It’s hard to feel the romance when your lover has started abusing you, as well as everyone else in the world.

What’s changed?  It’s not the lying, greed, and fraud:  those have been political staples from our first federal election.  It’s not the nastiness, character assassination, and negativity:  they’ve been around from the beginning too.  It’s not the money, the media, or the malarky: permanent fixtures in American political history.  The writer of Ecclesiastes asserts that there is nothing new under the sun.  Politics is mostly that:  nothing new.  It’s not as though the devil just recently discovered the enterprise.

There are few changes in how we do politics.  And that’s the trouble.  We have changed, our political process hasn’t.  We are wired together and intertwined in ways never before known in history.  Technology causes us to see, hear, and fear each other in ways never before possible.  Information glut gives a few pathways toward understanding a person or a matter, but more likely it traps us in a million mirrors of deception.  

Politics eats everything: our curiosity, our empathy, our logic.  It always has.  But because we are so intensely related and so vulnerable to each other, politics now cannibalizes the community itself.  It won’t change; so we must.  

Nobody’s curious about anything these days; we’re just mad.  Try to find someone who’s curious about immigration, gun control, abortion, the environment.  Bet you can't.  Curiosity is kryptonite to politics; so are empathy, logic, thinking outside the box.  Politics feeds off anger, outrage, self-righteousness, caricature, manipulation, outright lying.  There will never be political reform, only reform of those who are courted by politicians.

You may think by all this that everything about politics is always bad.  Not so. It is a necessity.  The word comes from the Greek, polis, which means city.  Politics, in its simplest form is the enterprise of leading a group of people toward a particular goal.  It is the opposite of anarchy.  In its raw form, politicians will do whatever it takes to get from Point A to Point B.  The more stupid and compliant the people being led, the more politicians will destroy them.  Best scenario politics comes from a sceptical, compassionate, curious public.

In the past, enough of life was beyond the reach of political victors that most of us could survive.  Not so anymore.  That’s what’s changed, all in the last couple decades.  Our politicians are no worse or better than they’ve ever been.  Our lives and world have gotten smaller in relation to them.

I don’t feel hopeless though.  While history has proven that nothing can cure a bad politician, it has also proven that people at large can change.  I’d like to start some curiosity clubs:  in person or online groups where we can take the toughest issues of our day and approach them with curiosity rather than emotion or partisanship.  

I’d like churches to get away from partisan politics and back to basics:  empathy, loving our neighbors, even the ones with the wrong political sign in their yards.  

I’d like a logical debate during election season—not between two reptilian candidates, but between diverse non-candidates, to help us think logically, outside the box about the issues facing us.  Wouldn’t it be great to hear smart, curious, empathetic, rational individuals debate, even if they’re not the candidates.  Maybe it would pressure the candidates to serve us better.  Let's have no more debates by the candidates themselves.  Let's have some real debates, by real people, non-candidates.

I'll probably still bake my election day cake.  And maybe a soup recipe or two from my file.  Okay... I'll do a loaf or two of bread too.  But instead of gluing myself to election results, maybe I'll play tennis and check the news the next morning... or week.