October 14, 2004 - Last night’s Presidential debate made clear that this election takes place in a deeply divided country and that it will be decided on issues that are quite literally matters of life and death. The conduct of the Second Iraqi War is the obvious example. The lives of allied combatants and innocent Iraqi victims are at stake in the policy decisions that drive the conduct of the war. Eroding or abolishing Roe v. Wade is another obvious example but these are not the only ones that raise issues of mortality.

The provision of affordable health care to Americans is a life of death issue. Life and death are at stake when decisions are made to pursue or abandon embryonic stem cell research. For many who have lost their income and exhausted their unemployment benefits each day brings new life or death decisions as they struggle to make it through one more day facing choices they no longer have the means to make. Choices between prescription medicines or adequate nutrition are life and death issues. Security of our cities, our transportation systems, and our ports involve questions of life and death or whole communities. Nuclear proliferation issues raise the question of life or death on a grand scale. Seldom has a Presidential election turned on issues that are literally questions of life or death both for the American people and for the world at large.

This first Presidential election of the 21st Century is as important as any has been in the Republic’s history. More is at stake in this election than has ever been before. Yet the majority of Americans eligible to vote in the election have already disenfranchised themselves by not registering as voters. If this election follows the pattern of the recent past only a minority of those who are registered to vote will exercise their right and go to the polls. The next President, the man who will be charged with making the life and death decisions for the country, will likely not obtain a majority of the people who do vote. Even if the winner prevails in both the popular vote and the Electoral College he will be the choice of a plurality of a minority of those whose citizenship gives them the right to choose.

Voting is more than a right. It is an obligation of citizenship imposed on each of us by the sacrifices of those man and women of many generations who suffered indignity, injury and death in the struggle to obtain that right to vote and to extend it from the few men who owned property to all of us without regard to gender, to race, to creed or to wealth. No one who voluntarily abandons the right that so many suffered to secure is worthy to be called American. No one who abdicates the duty to participate in this great ritual of democracy can in good conscience claim to be a patriot.