The Proximity of Polities

Everyday life, love-making and self-definition have long recaptured our primary attention since last fall's elections. Lately, though, when I hear people say, "I'm not into politics," I am curious as to their intent. Whether or not you identify with the political structure of this country and participate in it, as my mentor this past summer, Elisania Nunez, asserted, "Politics is into you."

Politics is full of our innermost fears, joys and passions not because the personal is political, but because the personal does not exist. Laws are directly tied to loves. Loves and love, because one-ness reduces us to an empty conception of "self" that has no meaning out of context, forcing us into a model of relating to others which ignores the multiplicity of our inherent possibilities.

While we may meet someone and fall in love now, we are always potentially in love with so many others that love takes on much more meaning than is implied by the idea of romance, commercialized and congealed into a Valentine's Day red, cellophane-wrapped chocolate nightmare.

Our sense of community is made up of our loves (and hates): our relationships with friends, heartthorbs and crushes, with relatives, professors and classmates. In short, we are deeply attached to all of the people who present possibilities or problems to us in our common struggle to endow each day with meaning.

The inherent conflict that these relationships of love and struggle create in us makes any idea of community complicated and politics difficult.

Politics is both less easily understood and more difficult to avoid than it is often given credit for being--voting is only the tip of the iceberg. Expressions of love and sex, as well as indifference and violence are more akin to the value-shaping and world-defining political process in which we are constantly engaged in, together.

As long as politics is popularly conceived as restricted to the domain of rights, paralysis and cynicism will remain its chief by-products.

Those who perpetuate the idea that political processes can help us to slip out of the network of joys and pains that social relations create fail to account for the sense in which the engine driving us cannot move without these fuels. Actually, the forces that govern us are better described as dialectical, involving both our individual impulses and the dictates of our social surroundings.

So, it is not enough to think about politics without recognizing that each of us is more complex than any Emersonian ideal. We are more than merely isolated individuals aiming for a monogamous, white picket fenced-in American dream. The myth of the individual self only leads to an acceptance of politics as boiling down into an economic game, waged by those who consider it worthwhile after weighing its costs and potential benefits.

Quite the contrary, it was not an economic decision that led me to trudge out into a driving rainstorm and head to the union building in Central Square last September where 1 volunteered to help get voters to the polls to support Alice Wolf. After winning with a mere 91 ballots cast during crucial last hours of polling, Representative Wolf is focusing on issues of importance to her constituents, including education and housing and economic development.

She frames her work in a simple, philosophical way that points to a complex, dynamic idea of politics. Not only is politics "a way for transformation" serving the individual voter and family. It is also "community-building," she explains.

It has been in this century that Americans have taken on the task of reaching for an ideal of democratic community that could extend beyond local enclaves of similar people.

Many Americans have only recently had the chance to enter the political community-building process, since women officially gained the vote and citizenship in 1920, and most blacks and many poor people were prevented from voting or legitimately participating in politics until the voting law reform and judicial landmarks of the 1960s.

Now that the structure is finally set up to actually include people from all backgrounds at all levels, we have some power to shape it and expand the meaning of politics and democracy beyond the mere act of voting so that it can play a role in the culture of collective self-definition.

The most recent cycle of voting may seem long over, but its fruits are making elected officials attempt to act as "arbiters," in Wolf's words, in our ongoing process of definition and improvement.

While she mediates among the diverse needs and goals of her constituents at the State House, we continue our lives of complicated political substance, working, writing, flirting, loving and building the basis for community across boundaries of dorms, college and locality.

She and many other responsible elected officials are now following through with the political acts we set into motion by going to the polls. They look to us for guidance in the everyday world-shaping process of politics. And we must consciously recognize and claim this process if we are ever to make it our own.

Emma C. Cheuse is a junior living in Dunster House.