Today is the Primary election in my home state of Connecticut, and of course I went and voted. As the prophet says: always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote.\r\n
I have written before about my passion for participatory self-government and Party politics. I wrote about why I am a Democrat<\/a>, ten years ago, and I agree with everything I said back then. I might say it even more strongly now, if I were able to conjure the words. I can at least say it again.\r\n I believe that politics is about community. I think that community is more important than any one policy or any bundle of policies; I think that community is more important than good government, honesty and integrity, or even peace and prosperity. The greatness of the election today is not that I voted<\/i>\u2014who cares about me?\u2014but that we voted<\/i>. We are all together in this. Every vote counts, but nobody\u2019s vote counts for very much as a single vote. I don\u2019t want to live in a nation where any one person gets to decide who runs the government, even if that person were me. In another note from that time, I wrote about holding your nose and voting<\/a>, in which I said (and still believe) that searching for a perfect candidate was not only a waste of time an energy but was actually antithetical to our Madisonian system. The system wants us to settle on compromise candidates, who perhaps none of us really like but enough of us think is Good Enough<\/a>, rather than holding out for some personal ideal that isn\u2019t widely shared.\r\n Today, I was thinking a little further along those lines, about how being part of a community means, to me, being able to focus outside myself for a bit. I\u2019m not just talking about political Parties, of course. We\u2019re part of a zillion communities, each of us, or at least I hope we are. I do amateur drama, which we in this country actually call community theater<\/i>, so it\u2019s right there in front of me all the time, but I\u2019m also in a family and a town and a workplace and a circle of friends. I\u2019m in a couple of social networks, which are their own sorts of communities. I\u2019m a Giants fan, and a fan of speculative fiction generally and a handful of writers particularly, and I\u2019m a fan of Elvis Costello and the Klezmatics. Some of those communities involve more or less active participation on my part, but they all have moments where what I want at the moment is different from other people want.\r\n Politics is about community, and community is about not always getting what you want. I\u2019m a member of a synagogue, and I\u2019m in larger communities of Jews, including the local Hartford community, American Jewry and Jews all over the world, as well as the community of the Reform movement and of the Ashkenazic heritage, and the historic community of generations. I have strong feelings about what\u2019s important to me within those communities, and there are surely times and sub-communities where I don\u2019t want to be in community with folk who want different things, sure. But I can absolutely sit down and pray with people who use the wrong tune to yismachu<\/i>. Somewhere in there is a balance, or a series of balances, where my preferences and priorities and other people\u2019s preferences and priorities can be temporarily satisfied, and I can be part of a community, even if I\u2019m right about yismachu<\/i> and they are wrong.\r\n There\u2019s always a terrible temptation to act as if my own feelings (and comforts and prejudices) are worth defending just because they are mine, and that others\u2019 are not, just because they are not mine. There\u2019s a temptation to block an intersection so that nobody can gain that extra car length that I deserve, and in truth the guy who is cutting in front of me doesn\u2019t deserve it any more than I do, so why not? But if I can see the traffic as a community, not perhaps quite a voluntary one but a community anyway, and ease up on my own place and think more about the flow of all the cars, I can see why blocking the intersection is an asshole move.\r\n