A Better Way to Vote

Voting in the United States of America’s corporate-run, two-party, profits-over-life system is a salvage operation. We know that among its many challenges, our system is polluted with money, contorted by gerrymandering and burdened by suppression. Engaging in that broken system can feel like endorsing the brokenness. But I also believe we must use what’s available to expand what’s possible. A vote is not a valentine to a politician. It’s a deposit toward the world we’re protecting and the better one we’re creating.

We’ve been told a tired story of voting as a duty, an obligation, a chore on a checklist. “Save democracy!” we’re admonished, as if democracy were a precious, fragile, untouchable vase on a shelf instead of something alive that requires tending, like a garden or a relationship.

What we’ve been missing is the articulation of a vision for our democracy that captures what we want it to be and how we want it to feel, not merely what we want to protect it from. We have failed to tell a story of how we actually want to exist together.

I’ve spent the last several years searching for stories big enough to hold us together—not the myth of rugged independence that got us to this point. I’m convinced that interdependence is the answer.

The story of independence has no shortage of champions. At its extreme, that story has driven us to see the people next door as competitors rather than neighbors, and the Earth as a set of resources to extract from rather than a community of relations to tend. We end up as disconnected individuals, holding tightly to what we can gain, protecting only a narrow circle we call our own.

Interdependence, on the other hand, is more true to our natural reality. A tree, for example, does not independently grow itself. There’s no version of a sequoia pulling itself up by its bootstraps. Trees and soil and fungi and insects and winds and light exist in an ecosystem of mutual aid supporting life. Relationships, not isolation, are what sustain life. This is interdependence.

I believe the times we are in require much more interdependence than independence to take us where we want to go. The great news is that such a story of an interdependent democracy is not new. It’s one of the oldest on this land.

Long before the United States Declaration of Independence, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—­originally formed by the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations, and later joined by the Tuscarora—governed themselves through a living system called the Great Law of Peace that balanced the sovereignty (or independence) of each nation with the essential truth of their interdependence. The system, still alive today, is rooted in five key principles: women are at the center of governance; humans live in reciprocity with the natural world; every decision considers seven generations ahead; peace is the highest calling of government; and law is rooted in the sacred and aligned with life.

When the fractious colonists couldn’t get along, it was Haudenosaunee leaders who urged them to form a union on July 4, 1744, more than three decades before 1776. Benjamin Franklin printed those words and spread them widely, modeling some of his own thinking, and the nation’s eventual founding, after them.

Many of the symbols we have come to identify as quintessentially American trace their roots to the Haudenosaunee: the eagle on our nation’s Great Seal follows the eagle sitting atop the Tree of Peace; the 13 arrows in a bundle representing the unity of the 13 colonies follows the five arrows in a bundle of the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; and concepts of the recall of chiefs and impeachment of presidents are also parallel.

Clearly, our nation’s founders did not institutionalize the Great Law of Peace at the time of separation from Great Britain. Despite this, many people today show these values are alive and well.

In the Twin Cities this year, when federal agents began terrorizing neighborhoods, the people responded where elected officials would not or could not. They didn’t meet the government’s violence and chaos with their own. Instead, they offered something more like an immune system response. Neighbors checking on neighbors. Parents on watch with whistles defending schools. Local businesses locking their doors but still feeding their communities. This was a mycorrhizal, cellular, ecosystemic response. Strong trees helping weak trees. Resources flowing through networks of trust, not command.

The vast majority of Minnesotans had probably never heard of, much less read, the Great Law of Peace. But they were living parts of it instinctively and intuitively. They are not alone. I know because I have seen it with my own eyes.

A few years ago, as I was filming my PBS series America Outdoors, I found myself in Elaine, Arkansas, the site of one of the deadliest race massacres in American history. I rode in with a multiracial bicycling group called Bike.POC along railroad tracks that once brought state-backed death and destruction to the Black residents of Elaine. Those tracks are now a rails-to-trails bike path. The town has elected its first Black mayor. The people have not erased this painful history. They’ve unearthed and composted it into something that can grow.

In Appalachia, I met former coal miners who’d become beekeepers, changing a violent relationship with a mountain into one of stewardship. In Oregon, a white rancher told me, “I don’t own this land. I’m taking care of it for these birds.” He sounded like every Indigenous elder I’ve ever listened to. And in the past two years, we have seen record organizing by outdoor lovers to defend our public lands.

Love is the key word.

So, as you prepare to vote in this election, ask yourself: Who do you love, and what kind of world do you want for them?

That question, first posed to me by Georgia-based activist and community organizer Nsé Ufot, is bigger than a candidate or campaign. It invites people to imagine the future they want, not just the present they fear. And it is a call to shift our minds from me to we: from independence and what I want for myself to interdependence and what we want for each other.

When you know what you love—the creek behind your house, the neighbors who showed up after the storm, the school where your kids learned to be brave, the land that feeds you—then voting stops being about candidates and starts being about care. It becomes one act in a constellation of acts that include showing up at a town meeting, feeding someone who’s hungry, standing between a human being and the machinery of cruelty, planting something in soil that was recently on fire.

The Minnesotans have a saying about ice, the frozen kind. They say: It’ll melt. That’s a long-view perspective that acknowledges the natural cycle of life, and it’s absolutely true. As Lauryn Hill sang, “After winter must come spring.” The Earth rotates, and we move through seasons. But to make the most of that change, we must prepare for it. We organize our seeds, our networks, our communities and our resources. We compost the old into soil for the new growth to come.

This year marks 250 years since a group of rebels declared their independence from an empire. It’s worth reflecting on that act. But I think the next 250 years belong to a different declaration, one rooted not in separation but connection. Not in what we hate, but in what we love. Not We the People as a claim of ownership, but We the Living as a promise of belonging to each other.

So: Who do you love, and what kind of world do you want for them?

Start there. That’s the seed. Everything else grows from it.