It’s all I can do to keep myself from coming undone when I hear
people say it’s all about the shape of our country before quickly adding that they
don’t plan to vote.
There are
plenty of places around the globe you can live where you have no vote, thus you
have no choice—the powers that be will decide for you how things will go and
you’ll be forced to live with the result.
America offers each of us a different right—the right to vote. We don’t have to love the candidates or
everything they stand for because let’s face it—with hundreds of issues (such
as education, medical insurance, human rights, immigration, finance, border
control, welfare, equality and military might just to name a few) vying for
attention, we’re all going to have a different set of issues that top our
list. But as Americans, we’re tasked
with the responsibility to school ourselves on the issues and make a choice.
The sad fact of our time is there are
numerous groups of people very vocal about their desire to kill us by any means
possible; planes, trains, bombs, guns, chemicals, box cutters, women,
children… For some it’s our skin
color. For others it’s our
religion. Or who we love or where we
live or how we handle our business affairs or sins of the father, or, or,
or… It’s a list that’s impossible to
define because every day we continue to draw breath, we offend someone and
another thing gets added to the list of things they hate about us—AMERICANS.
Which leaves us with a choice. We can continue complaining about how much we
dislike the things happening around us while praying they don’t start happening
to us. That’s one course of action.
Or we can educate ourselves on the issues and
try to make the best decision we can hope to make with what we have to work
with. If we were stranded on that
proverbial desert island, I would like to think the people I love and those I
rub shoulders with wouldn’t throw themselves in the sand and let us die because
they didn’t want to touch a thorny plant, or study all aspects of what we were
up against, or get a splinter, or consider other’s opinions about our odds, or eat
coconut they didn’t like, or risk the poison sumac. I’d like to think we’d humble ourselves and
pray for rescue before teaming up despite our differences in ability and
opinion. That we'd fight against the odds, doing anything we thought would give us
a chance to live one more day.
Which leaves me to wonder… Why are so many of
us suddenly unwilling to do the very same thing for America?
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