The Battle Continues

Yesterday my five-year-old came home from kindergarten with a sticker on that read, “I voted.” I smiled at him and asked if he voted in school today. He looked down at the floor and immediately his breathing changed. He gasped and tears started running down his cheeks which he tried to brush away, embarrassed. He said, “I voted for John McCain, but everyone else voted for Barak Obama.” By the end, his tears were coming too hot and fast to brush away and my heart sank as far as it possibly could. This was definitely not something wanted my little boy stressing over. I faked a smile and told him that it was okay and he didn’t need to be sad about it. He looked up at me with extremely intense little eyes and said, almost without more tears, “But Marcos voted for Barack Obama too and, and…” the tears flowed freely once again, “Barak Obama won.”


I started to see the overwhelming complexity of the dilemma facing my little one. I knew how much he loved his friend Marcos. I also knew how much he loved his parents, who had made it clear that we believed in freedom and could, thus, not support the Democratic nominee. He had voted knowing he was making the right choice. But had he expected that the reason a choice was right was because it was the winning choice? Had he been confident, because of his parents, that his candidate would win and felt completely betrayed that he hadn’t? I knew I was facing a very delicate situation. I could not say anything derogatory about the choice his friends had made. Apparently he was already being shunned and mocked at school for standing up and being different. On the other hand, I had to make it clear that the choice he had made was right, despite being unpopular. It was all only a microcosm for the feelings I would inevitably face later in the day as the results of the National election were announced.


The crux of the message I gave Ryan must be said again, for everyone that made the right, if unpopular, choice yesterday. I believe deeply that freedom is not just a social construct or a result of our culture. Freedom is a moral issue. My belief in God makes it one. If we were created by an all-powerful Heavenly Father, then it is absolutely clear that the most primary of his gifts to us is our free agency. He does not dictate our lives. He only gives us correct council which is ours to accept or reject. The trouble is that when we reject the correct way, we always end up losing, by our own design, that free agency we were given. Take, for example, the individual who chooses to become a slave to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Of course, she never considers the slavery she is subjecting herself to and probably remains convinced that she is still free, long after the war has been lost. I have a very intuitive friend who once told me that “everything evil is addictive.” I think that is a very profound statement.


But in the sense of government, the tradeoff is even more obvious. When you decide to ask the government for more services or money, you are inherently surrendering some of your individual agency in exchange. This principle is painfully clear in the school system where I live. They provide free preschool here, but you cannot take your child out of school without meeting their rules. (death in the family, hospitalization, or illness) If you do, or neglect to provide proof of your child’s illness, they will take you to court. I am not kidding. According to this state, I am not even qualified to decide if my own son is too sick to attend school. I have to visit a doctor for the simplest viral illness. And yet people continue to willingly surrender their rights, even the right to parent their own children, to the government.


This is all a little advanced for a five-year-old. But I desperately wanted my son to understand. So, I explained to him that we have the right to choose and when we make good choices, good things happen and when we make bad choices, bad things happen. I told him that it was okay that his friends made a different choice than him because they have the right to choose too, and we must never deny them that right. I couldn’t explain to him that free agency never only affects you, however. I couldn’t tell him how a family may be destroyed by a parent’s decision to take drugs or how a country could be destroyed by the choices of some when the right choice is unpopular. He’s too small to really understand that.


Luckily, my son taught me something as well. I wanted him to understand that we needed to continue pushing forward and standing up for our free agency even when it is not popular. I wanted him to understand that we can be happy no matter the circumstances brought about by others' choices. I wanted him to understand that his friendships should not be sacrificed because of a difference of opinion and that he should continue to love those around him, no matter what choices they made. In telling him these concepts, I also told them to myself.


Sometimes I feel like this country is floating so far away from the liberty on which it was founded that hope for freedom is winking out. I am afraid as the government grows bigger and my choices grow smaller. But my son’s elementary school election taught me that my family will pick up and move on. I will continue fight for the cause of freedom in my choices, even the freedom of those whose choices would hurt me. I will do it because it is right. Throughout history, this cause has often been unpopular and frequently seemed completely lost. It is not.


This morning I dressed my son in his American flag t-shirt and sent him back to the battleground. To those of us still fighting, remember that before the ballots are all counted, there are still 55,729,124 of us on the side of freedom. Many of us didn’t support John McCain in the primary, but we didn’t give up, because our cause is just. There are still right choices to be made. Our God-given agency is not gone.