The ‘inconvenient season’: Why voter apathy is inexcusable

Allow me this one complaint: Voter apathy is the great enemy of our republic.

The absence of long lines at polling places throughout the country does not bespeak contentment with our government, nor does it confirm the stability of our frayed democracy.

It indicates an irony so deep and dangerous it defies imagination to think — to know — that, amidst conquests in the Middle East and the religious slaughter of our fellow Americans, and elsewhere, in the avaricious actions of a Soviet-communist-turned-Russian-nationalist foe, in so many foreign capitals where we erroneously celebrate that there are no red states or blue states, there is just one knee-deep crimson river of blood.

How can a citizen be apathetic about such things?

Why would a person stay home, or, in the obscene reduction of politics into the terminology of a sporting event, "sit this one out" while the legislators who will exercise power in our name will do so with anything but apathy?

The fault for this crisis rests with the mistaken belief that your vote does not matter. Not true.

One vote — a mere handful of votes — encapsulates the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.

One vote is the reason why this nation was spared the removal of the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, in 1868.

One vote is the difference between the Supreme Court’s defense of gay marriage versus its erasure from the Union, dissolving millions of unions, and dislodging parents from children and tearing families asunder.

Your vote puts the man or woman in office, in Honolulu or Washington, D.C., who will either be an agent of liberty or a self-possessed filibuster against the march of freedom. How is apathy excusable in the face of such inexcusable consequences?

If my words seem too strident, my reply is, I suppose, even more frank: Tough.

For, I know all too well how apathy can be the seedling for imperial impulses, from which democracy disintegrates into tyranny and the long shadow of tanks darkens the streets in Beijing and Budapest.

Concerning the latter, I still hear the plaintive warning of a great Hungarian émigré.

The request from this former refugee, a Jew hunted by the ideology of Hitler and temporarily enslaved by the paranoia of Stalin, is a summons to vote.

This man, for whom I had the honor to work, saw Nazi flags adorn the grand buildings and boulevards of Budapest. He saw the Iron Curtain descend upon his beloved country, a prelude to a half-century of summary executions, show trials, re-education camps and a democratic uprising crushed.

This witness to personal and political upheaval is George Soros, the billionaire investor, philanthropist and voting rights advocate.

He is a living rebuke to the idea that your vote is of no significance because, when that attitude spreads and infects our populace — when we succumb to laziness, and praise "order" over justice — we perpetuate the most inhumane forms of injustice: Torture, police brutality, the suspension of due process of law and the mutation of a continental nation into a police state, where bureaucrats illegally eavesdrop and monitor our conversations.

Apathy abets these crimes because we choose not to know what we conveniently choose not to see.

We give silent license to the unelected and the unaccountable to do the unthinkable: Despoil our Constitution, and shred the Bill of Rights into razor-thin streamers of confetti.

On Nov. 4, 2014, we have a chance to reclaim our rights.

We have a duty to abandon the false comfort of apathy. We have a responsibility to vote.