There are two political philosophies that I live by. 

The first is printed over a drawing of the American flag on a framed poster that hangs on the door of my office.  It reads:

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism – Howard Zinn.

I bought it somewhere a little over 15 years ago (Note: Do the political math and you can figure out why) in utter frustration over where I feared the country was headed.

It wasn’t as if I thought a poster would do much but at least it would remind me, and whoever entered my lair, that voicing a counter opinion about anything is a time-honored tradition and a significant contribution to society.

Little did I imagine…well…so many things…

It wasn’t about Mr. Zinn – though no surprise I’d be drawn to a fellow Jew from the boroughs of NYC who was a prolific teacher and leading writer on the civil rights, labor and anti-war movements. A man who self-described as something of an anarchist, something of a socialist and maybe a democratic socialist.

I might not be fully enough any of those for my taste (Note: These days I can’t figure out where I stand other than thoroughly and angrily disgusted)  but I sure do lean more in that direction than towards the side of blind fascism, rabid racism and an aspiring oligarchical billionaire class. (Note: Please know this is the first, and hopefully last time, I’ll ever used oligarchical in a sentence).

As for the second philosophy:

Well, it’s emblazoned on a t-shirt I bought back in the late eighties or early nineties, aka The Plague Days. Sure, it’s a bit old, a bit faded and perhaps a bit dated to some. But then again, so am I.

It reads:

Freedom is the distance between Church and State.

It’s almost 40 years old, and I purchased it in a store I don’t remember, but I do know it was long before you could order anything online from a touch phone. What I do recall is that, at the time, I was even more apoplectic than I was when I purchased the poster.

And it was over what the Rev. Jerry Falwell or the Rev. Pat Robertson or the Christian theocrat politicos like Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, Jr. were running around saying about gay people night and day while huge percentages of us were dying of AIDS.

Our immorality, our danger to children, their legislation to have our rights stripped and perhaps our bodies quarantined.  Proclamations about sin and lies about the country not being secular but instead rooted in a type of dogmatic fundamentalism that goes against every philosophical principal our Founding Fathers (Note: And mothers in the background) had intended.

Lies, all of it, but lies that, at the time, threatened to be accepted as truth.

I knew the t-shirt wouldn’t do much but at least it was an advertisement of where I stood. And a reminder that government has nothing to do with the myriad ways any one of us choose or refuse to practice faith. And that anyone seeking to interject their dogma into law, or even the conversation, would get push back from at least one mouthy not very tall guy from Queens and all of the many people who thought like me…I mean, him.

Which, I knew, were many.

All of the above is my way of saying prior to Election Day this week that it feels especially good to speak up in times when you’re frustrated, angry, pissed off, over it or trying so hard to hold it together that you fear if you let it out you will explode and spend the rest of your life in jail for murder.

You won’t. 

Because even better than buying a poster or wearing a T-shirt the best way to safely express all of it, and more, is to:

VOTE.

Sure, it doesn’t always feel like much when you do.  But it’s the ultimate golden ticket that, en masse,  keeps democracy flowing.  And you sane.

And yes, of course democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, as Winston Churchill was quoted as saying to the British House of Commons after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler.

But it’s all we have.

And the VOTE is the one thing we ALL have to keep it going. 

It WILL count and BE counted as long as enough of us do it and demand it happen.

So just do it.

Not in a Nike way.

In the most singularly American way.

And then buy all the snidely insurgent posters and T-shirts you want and put them on display anywhere you so choose.

Because that’s what freedom is about.

Provoking people.

Among so many other things.

The Beatles – “Come Together”