I was thinking about my collegiate major the other day. I’m a “Rhetoric and Media Studies” major at Willamette University. Anywhere else, they’d call it a communications degree. The academicians can certainly tell the difference, but I was thinking about my plan before I got to college. You see, I was done with my high school communicative pursuits. I was going to be a politics major. I even started my class schedule in accordance with that goal.
There are reasons why I am no longer a politics major.
The first, I think, is purely personal. I decided that I was legitimately more interested in the communicative aspects of politics than the political bits. I was interested in the study of communicating truth across a wide spectrum of mediums … not just within the political arena.
With that personal preference in mind, my Russian history professor summed up the second reason. He said, “Not everything is distilled into politics.” In understanding society, truth, history, community, and people (as individuals or as groups) we can take a look at their political views, but only as a type of intermediate expression of what they actually believe. It’s easy to take a cynical look at the political system. It’s much harder to dig beneath that veneer of spectacle to the heart of the matter.
There was a political analysis column at Willamette. Cleverly entitled (Political) Party Animals, my main beef was beyond the relatively shallow analysis. After all, they only had 500 words or so. My problem came from the expression of armchair electioneering that is the close cousin of “Monday Morning Quarterbacking.” It’s easy to analyze politics and Sunday Night Football after the fact and from the safe comfort of our own room.
Change requires substantially more effort. I would contend that it even requires more than the oft-touted and oft-clichéd ideas of “vote, contact your political representative, and demonstrate your support.” To simply analyze today’s political issues without the commitment to engage the political system is a culturally-accepted practice of futility.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking politics majors. Some of them are my close friends. I’m knocking a mentality that only extends to hindsight analysis or the rudimentary leftovers of a democratic system. Simply saying, “Vote!” isn’t in and of itself enough any more. The current problems call for larger solutions.
Call me idealistic. It’s probably a true analysis. But that idealism causes me to want to engage with things that extend to a deeper and more substantial level. Because everything cannot be distilled into politics, I want to engage beyond the mere political sphere in people’s lives. Rather, agitate the deepest parts of people’s minds and hearts.
Again Matt, you have hit it so well and so deftly. It’s the very reason I have increasingly drifted away from the political fervor of my youth. Ultimately it’s not the politicians or the analysts that define society and make the changes that people so desperately want. It’s not the elected officials or the speech writers or even the presidents that change nations for better or ill. As Douglas Gresham once said, the worlds leaders are in the classrooms, in the film and music studios, and at their desks churning out books you and I will never read. (Twilight, anyone?) They are the ones who subtly and quite often unintentionally redirect the hearts and minds of men. In a truly democratic society, it can be none but these men and women.
Ben