Further On Up the Road

It’s hard to believe that by this time next Wednesday we will have gone from knee-deep in election year hoopla to waist-deep in big muddy aftermath, depending on for whom you voted and the results of those votes (and how far along the tabulation process is). 

That will probably be of small solace this week as your social media feeds, your email and snail-mail inboxes, and newspapers fill to bursting with information, letters of support, and endorsements for everyone on the ballot, sometimes to include people of whom you'd not yet heard. 

Here's the thing about all of that: the letters to the editor, comments in the online forums of the newspapers, calls to the radio shows, heated discussions with family and neighbors in your living room or street corner--ALL OF IT MEANS NOTHING if you don't vote. 

Nothing changes if we don't make the commitment to change. You want to blame somebody for the way things are? Start by looking in the mirror and then work your way around the room. It's certainly a target-rich environment, isn't it?

If you've been holding your breath reading this far and waiting for me to tell you either for whom I voted (I cast a mail ballot two weeks ago) or for whom you could/should vote, you can exhale and resume normal speed as neither is going to happen. 

That you vote is all that concerns me. We’re deciding everything from who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation’s capital, who speaks for us in the House of Representatives, who we'd like as our State Senator and our State Representative plus selecting a registrar of voters. 

Voting is serious business. Not everyone around the world gets to do it and a lot of us had friends and family, not to mention complete strangers sacrifice their lives so we could have this moment of choice but no pressure. If you want to vote, you'll make the time and if you don't, you'll make an excuse. 

But should you make that excuse grab your stuff and go sit on the far side of the city, or better yet, the state. Go ahead, start walking. Keep going. If I can still hear you complaining about how things are, and you decide not to vote, you'll need to be so far from me I can't hear you at all. 

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.”  

While Churchill was many things, prescient wasn't necessarily one of them so I don't think his remarks were intended as a commentary on this or any specific election but your mileage may vary depending on your perspective. 

Do you see government as something done to you or for you? Are you a victim or a victor? There’s the magic of choice in our imperfect form of government. Freedom of choice works best when everyone who can make a choice, chooses to make one.

So, choose, or we all lose.
-bill kenny