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I must admit that, when it comes to politics, too much solidarity gives me the creeps.

Trying to get thousands of individuals, each with fully-functioning, individual brains inside their fully-functioning individual skulls, to agree on anything requires a fair bit of bullying.

To get them to agree on a whole package of things, like a party's record of past performance or its platform for the future, requires a lot of people to swallow a lot of things they probably don't really believe.

This is what happens at election time. At other times, only our MPs and their assorted hangers-on have to march in mindless lock-step. The rest of us are free to leave them to it, disputing with them or laughing at them, or maybe even agreeing with them from time to time. We can pick and choose what we support or oppose, which is a good thing, because no party is entirely good or evil, and nobody in them is entirely right or wrong.

They are a frustrating mix of things we like and things we don't like. Often they do things we don't like, to accomplish things we want. And often they do things we like, but produce results we hate.

But when you walk into the voting booth, you can't really "Xpress yourself", as the old PLP slogan used to tell us, because your thoughts are far too convoluted. You can only put your 'x' on one square or the other square. It's an either-or choice that doesn't fit the way most people think.

For the last few weeks, the people of Bermuda have been pushed, yelled at, insulted, cajoled, teased, bribed, bullied and caressed in an almost obscene kind of way until more than 40,000 individual opinions were turned into two big opposing angry viewpoints.

Solidarity is what the parties needed. The last thing they wanted were free-thinkers. "Solid As A Rock", the PLP proclaimed. "Together We Will", the UBP declared. They desperately needed Bermudians to deny their individual thoughts and doubts and march in lock-step to the ballot box. It's pretty scary, having to vote for a political party that admits no doubt about anything, and disagrees with absolutely everything that the other party said. You should never trust anybody who is dead certain about everything, but that's what every voter is asked to do.

It's pretty scary, too, having to agree with so many people on so many things at the same time.

Even when you think you cast your vote for the right side, it's pretty scary knowing that half the island thinks you've been brainwashed and are completely wrong, that you are behaving in a dangerous way and will probably destroy the country if you get your way. I suppose we've all been brainwashed without knowing it.

We've all been herded together to make our X's. The winners have strutted away and the losers have crawled away. The mindless solidarity has served its purpose.

After the last few weeks, I'm in the mood for a little tolerance and forgiveness, self-doubt and questioning, maybe even a little backtracking here and there, and borrowing an idea or two along the way. That's usually the best way forward. All the determination in the world, all the goals in the world, all the solidarity you can muster, aren't worth having if you can't be a real, individual human being. So now can we be ourselves again?[[In-content Ad]]

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