I will confess to being gratified that Obama has secured the nomination. I will also confess to complete mystification at the comments of some supporters of Hillary that they have been disenfranchised; that their votes have been ignored or don’t count. In any election, someone wins and someone loses. The loser’s votes were counted, they just came up short. Oh, it’s about the party nomination rules? Well the proportional voting system (and the fact that actual voting takes place rather than caucuses attended only by party faithful) is fairer in my opinion in recognizing the votes of the minority than winner take all. More interesting to me is some history of which I was unaware–the conflict between women getting the right to vote and blacks getting the right to vote. See the article by Shankar Vedantam in the Monday Washington Post.
Vedantam notes that while a passionate abolitionist, woman’s suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments (among other things, giving blacks the right to vote) following the Civil War. Later, when the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote) came up for a vote in 1920, black issues were off the table in order to assure passage. The article goes on to point out that rather than looking at who has been more unfairly disadvantaged, it may be more fruitful to note who has been more unfairly advantaged. From there, the issue becomes unfairness itself. To that end, those who have been disadvantaged can stop focusing on what has been done to them and on ensuring fairness to all. For me, as a Buddhist, the point is fundamentally clear. Whatever advantages or disadvantages I enjoy or suffer come as a result of my own doing–my karma. I can transcend them not so much by ignoring them but by taking full credit or blame for them rather than looking elsewhere. I, a white man, have been married for nearly 28 years to a black woman. In travels throughout America she and I have never been the subject of mistreatment on account of race. How is that possible? Only through the human revolution that the practice of Buddhism enables us to do.
So when it comes to the 2008 presidential election, I hope all Democrats can rise above petty disagreements over who was more unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged in the selection process to be the party nominee and focus on the decidely more important issue of ending the era of Bush Republicanism. If you want to look at unfairness, there is eight years of it to examine during Dubya’s reign.
