A Vote for Myself; E. Breese

584 counts. To my mind, it's the only one that does count on the local, state or national basis. That's be cause it is an intensely personal vote - so personal and so mean ingful that I can't just mark a ballot or pull a lever and then walk away from the voting booth. This one I have to put into ac tion. I have to live with it day by day and even hour by hour. It be comes action and thought and then action again - so it doesn't pass away after one count. It doesn't drop back into the record of events past and forgotten. This vote I must cast over and over and over; it remains a continuing force, set ting up innumerable chains of ac tion and reaction, touching the lives of more and more people be sides myself. I'm talking about my own vote for myself, of course. That's the only one I can cast, and make it stick. I don't mean voting for myself for Congress or City Commission or any other public office. I mean the vote I cast for myself as a member in full standing of the human race - my vote of con fidence in myself as a rational, responsible citizen - responsible among men and under God. That is the all-important vote. My hap piness depends upon it - and my self-respect - and both survival and victory in the battle of life.

1972 A VOTE FOR MYSELF 585 Actually, I have little choice. Be cause I am a sentient being, I have to cast that vote of confi dence in myself or just cast it away. If I do the latter, I've abdi cated a very large part of my membership in the human race. I've chosen to accept my status as a second class citizen - or worse. It's an unthinkable alterna tive. At least, it's unthinkable to me. Of course, once I've cast that vote for myself, I'm elected. In that particular balloting it's the only vote that counts. Before I. cast it I have to be willing to assume the responsibilities, the risks, and the duties that go with the election. I have to be willing to think for myself. Rather than accepting leadership, command, or even blind· guidance from Authority, I have to use my rational faculties. I have to look behind even the best intentioned propaganda, and find the meaning that may underlie the fine words. I must strive al ways to be Homo sapiens, the thinking man.

I mu~t strive to be the moral man - that is, to exercise my faculty of telling right from wrong as these apply to me in my own life and circumstance. Above all, I must strive for the strength to act upon the knowl edge of these things. Rather then yielding to the im pulse to complain or resent the political and economic forces which buffet us in the nineteen seventies, I have to be willing to do something within the-only span of control that is pragmatically open to me - that is, within my own life. I must deal with such menaces as inflation and pollution by re liance on the market forces of supply and demand rather than regulation and control and deficit financing by government. I must combat creeping monolithic sta tism by learning to rely upon my own resources of brain and hands and skills and courage, rather than upon the benificent "big brotherism" of the welfare state. Most of all, the vote I cast for myself is one I also must extend to my fellow man. I must grant to him the same right and the privi lege of self-reliance that I would claim.

I am not afraid of the predicted "collapse by the year two thou sand." That song was being sung to the same tune when the first millenium was ending. I am going to cast a vote for myself this year, and each year, in the assurance that I am not alone in this, and that we who do so not only will survive but will build a world in which we all may live. , AgelessFaith fora VacillatingAmgirc ROBERT G. BEARCE MAN ACTS according to his faith. Even those who ridicule faith in God, in freedom, in the individ ual - even tyrants - have a degree of faith in the brute force they employ. And, unfortunately, this faith in coercion is spreading its contagion of gloom and doom, causing stalwart Americans to doubt the faith of our Fathers. Robert K. Walker, a Tennessee attorney, spelled out the problem in 1968: People who think well of themselves collectively exhibit enthusiasm and morale. When nations cease believing in themselves, when they regard their institutions with cynicism and their traditions with flippancy, they will not long remain great nations.