Instead of thinking about the choices America has made, I’m thinking about the choices we will be making. I’ve said before that at Bowdoin we have to make a lot of choices—Moulton or Thorne, tea or coffee, sleep or homework. For the past year, we’ve focused on making a choice between two people and this was a huge decision with huge implications. Now that the dust has settled from Election Day, we can think about other choices, too.
The fact is that choosing a president is a really big decision, but there are other decisions that are bigger than two people that don’t have a campaign season or a party. These are choices about the kind of people that we want to be, the kind of country we want to be a part of and the kind of world we want to live in and leave behind. They aren’t always national races—sometimes they happen in the library, the dining hall or the classroom. These choices don’t have an Election Day, a time when we can cast a ballot, wait for results to come in and know that our decision has made a difference.
Or do they?
I think that every day might be a sort of Election Day. The choices we make at Bowdoin on November 9 can have the same significance as our choices on November 8. Remembering that our choices have an impact every day can help us affect the kind of change we want to see, so we might not have to wait another four years to realize the things that are important to us.
Here at Bowdoin, many of us were privileged to vote in Tuesday’s election. Many of us also have the privilege to vote in other ways on the other 364 days out of the year. We, as adults, can vote with our money, our time, our enthusiasm, our careers and more. Regardless of how you voted for president, you have other opportunities to put plans and agendas into action. Whether you’re volunteering at a local school, choosing to buy fair trade coffee, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights or going out of your way to practice extra kindness in your day-to-day life, these things matter too, even when they can feel small.
When we buy textbooks, our money that goes to the author says, “Yes, I like what you’re doing. Do more of it” (or at least “My professor likes what you’re doing. Do more of it”). When we spend our time volunteering for the environment, social justice or reproductive rights, we’re saying “You are worthy of my time and my energy, and I will give up my time to rest or watch Netflix because I like what you’re doing. Do more of it, I want to help.” When we choose jobs (way down the line—I’m looking at you, Career Planning), we’re saying “This is important enough to me that I want to spend 40+ hours a week doing it. Do more of it.”
Spending our money and our time and our lives on something is voting. Not in quite the same way, perhaps. But we make choices every day that are part of issues and ideas larger than even a presidential candidate and since we have four years until another election, let’s not forget about voting with our individual choices and actions until 2020 comes around.
At Bowdoin, we are a community with a wide range of opinions and experiences and we didn’t all make the same choice in Tuesday’s election. But since we’re part of the same community, I think we value some things in common, too—things that we’re still voting on now. It’s time to zoom in from the race between two candidates and see what choices we can make now, today, for issues of economic, racial, social and environmental justice.
I write in this column about the individual impacts that we make as Bowdoin students and this week, I see those impacts as mini-ballots. After looking at the red-and-blue map on Tuesday, let’s focus our attention on ourselves and our surroundings and keep voting for the things that matter to us.