I'm told it is
sometimes helpful to project outside yourself, to mess with your own
ideological boundaries, to attempt, however exasperatingly and however
much it makes you want to hose yourself down with the cool fire of
intellectual clarity afterwards, to enter the minds of your enemies, or
those with whom you merely disagree, or -- perhaps most challenging of
all -- with those whose mental gyrations you simply cannot fathom in
the slightest.
Behold, the Undecideds. Have you heard of this bizarre,
nefarious group? The millions of faceless, slow-blinking, mentally
unattached Americans who are, right this minute, with mere days to go
before the most historic election in our lifetime and when faced with
what seems to be the most glaringly obvious divisions of attitude and
perspective you could possibly imagine, still "on the fence" about
Obama or McCain, love or hate, country or disco, Paris or Fresno, oil
or water, Porsche or Pinto?
Do you know anyone from this group? Those who have the uncanny
ability to stare straight at the biggest issues and most momentous
decisions of their very lives, and shrug?
Odds are very good you do. Because they are, apparently,
legion. And pivotal. And they are, it must be said, one of the most
baffling groups in world history. Impenetrable. Unnerving. As such, it
is perhaps a worthy experiment to try to enter the Undecided mind, to
examine what might be going on -- or, as the case may be, not going on.
What we risk: instant madness, increased frustration, screaming.
What we stand to gain: perspective, empathy, more screaming. Shall we?
Firstly, some quick assumptions. I hereby assume the Undecideds are not
the Classic American Zombie. They are not the socially and politically
ignorant, the millions of culturally apathetic, uneducated Americans
you often read about who live way off the intellectual grid, who don't
read, don't vote, don't eat with utensils, don't care, don't know how
to care and have never really evolved their own intellectual curiosity
much beyond the walk-upright-and-don't-drool stage. In other words, the
Undecideds still pay attention. Sort of.
This, perhaps, is the first major snag: From what I can glean, it seems the Undecideds pay just enough attention. They care a little,
maybe just enough to vote, to take part in a political tracking polls
and interviews, to latch onto irrelevant effluvia, to nod with
brow-furrowed interest when their more attuned friends speak
passionately about a given issue. But that's about as far as it goes.
For an Undecided, then, everything is received wisdom.
Everything is a mishmash of external sources, a haphazard blur of
everyone else's ideas, headlines, tidbits of disconnected thought and
rumor, and the thing they believe most is merely the last thing they
heard that "sounded about right."
Upshot: no original thought. No sifting and sorting and
careful deliberation, resulting in a calm statement of self-determined
purpose. There is only, perhaps, fear of taking a stand, of having an
opinion, of believing in something, anything, lest you be proven
ignorant or pitiable or Britney Spears. Psychology experts, start your
engines.
If this definition holds true, if there's such a large and
powerful group that, given its lethargic inability to make
distinctions, requires all sorts of trickery and flash to hold their
fleeting attention, well, it makes the Undecideds a rather hugely
dangerous lot indeed. And sort of pathetic. And really lousy in bed.
Or maybe not. Maybe I have it exactly backwards. Maybe the Undecideds are the most evolved among us, more
aware and conscious than the rest of us desperate plebes who are far
too eager to plant our flags in the treacherous soil of definitive
thought. Possible?
Could it be that the Undecideds have developed an enlightened,
Zen-like meta-perspective, wherein they see all social melodramas and
political extremes as essentially the same, all part of the Grand
Cosmic Circus? And therefore deciding something as piffling as Obama
versus McCain -- that is, whether to kick human experiment forward with
intelligence and thoughtfulness, or lock it into conservative
Tupperware and shove it in the back freezer for another 30 years -- is
pointless and unnecessary, merely part of the same cosmic joke?
Hell, I've oft championed the necessity of keeping your mind
juicy and spirit fluxive, of never letting dogma bog you down and clog
your karmic drain. Have the Undecideds mastered this rare skill? Let me
just hedge a tentative answer right here: not a chance. After all,
there's a profound difference between lucid energetic fluidity and,
well, mealy mental dithering.
One more possibility: The Undecideds might be largely made up
of the politically disenchanted, the remnants of the ideological
fringe, libertarians and the Independents and the Ron Paul/Nader
fanatics who, since their dreamy marginal candidate has been relegated
back to footnote status, are trained to merely see the other options as
equally worthless, cogs in the same corporate machine.
I'm not buying it. For one thing, most of those activists have
a clearly demonstrated -- if a bit wonky -- ability to choose. And
let's just say it outright: Even if you can't tell much difference
between Obama's and McCain's tax policies or approaches to Pakistan or
whatnot, the difference in intuitive energies, in sheer vibrational attitude,
between the calm, deeply intelligent Harvard-trained senator and the
curmudgeonly war hawk with a nasty temper are so profound as to keep
entire nations awake at night. It's a bit like choosing between a glass
of wine and a beer bong full of turpentine and carpet tacks. Sure you
can ingest them both, but come on.
Do not misunderestimate. I do not mean to suggest that it's
mandatory that everyone take some sort of extreme black/white position
every time. It is not about grabbing a mulish, uninformed stance and
never budging. Moderate, reflective positioning is fine. But that's still a position.
Undecideds aren't moderates. They do not seem to be clear on what they
value, exactly. They're just ... I'm not sure what. Confused? Simple?
Overmedicated?
The days are dwindling. The choice is nigh. And the strange
news is, somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of the voting nation is
still undecided, still unsure, still apparently waiting, after
countless debates and speeches, thousands of articles and profiles and
policy wonkings, biographies, autobiographies, detailed lists of
everything from the type of foods the candidates like to sports teams
they root for to the kind of car they drive, for some impossible fog to
clear.
The good news is, this election probably won't hinge quite so
dramatically on the Undecideds' final decision, whatever the hell it
might be. The bad news is, these infuriating creatures of tepid doom
show no signs of going extinct anytime soon.
