It’s hard to believe but this time next Wednesday we’ll have gone from knee deep in election year hoopla to waist-deep in big muddy, depending on for whom you voted and the results of all those votes.
Winston Churchill once said “Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”
As I understand it, Mr. Churchill did not live to see this year’s US presidential elections, not that it would have made a yuuuuge difference, I suspect, in his perspective (but you never know).
Point in fact, especially when it’s a Presidential election year, I sometimes find my focus wavers as I go down the ballot which this year promises to be longer than my attention span. And that’s perhaps exactly as it should be because there are a lot of important and informed voting decisions we need to make Tuesday.
Don’t worry I’m not going to tell you how I think you should vote because your choices are none of my business. That you are going to vote is all that concerns me. And, yeah, there are a million things going on in each of our lives that leave us so little free time but, at least in these parts, the polls open at six in the morning and close at eight at night.
So if you want to vote, you will find the time; if you don’t, you will find an excuse. But when you do find an excuse, do me a favor? Go sit all the way down on the end of the bench over there. Nope, farther than that; keep going. I can still hear you complaining at how things are, so keep walking because if you didn’t want to vote I don’t want to hear you at all. Ever.
What? Exactly. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. And all of us will live with the consequences. We have a Senatorial race, a congressional representative, and choices to make for seats in the state senate as well as in the lower chamber and there’s also that new color for the plain M & M’s. I was just checking to see if you were reading, or skimming. You passed.
But seriously, serious decisions will be made Tuesday and we, the people, are the ones doing the deciding. However you decide, I fully support your choices; even if we disagree with each other.
That’s the truly magical thing about this wildly imperfect form of government under which we operate. And that freedom of choice works best when as many of us who can make a choice, choose to make one.
Lawn signs, lapel pins and bumper stickers are great. But vote.
-bill kenny
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