Why We Must Vote

On this last Sunday of July, in the worst of the summer heat, I have a strange mixture of feelings about the coming season.

There’s the normal anticipation of fall and the freshening of cooler weather. But this year all that is unfortunately blended with a measure of sourness and dread. This November, of course, we will have that election.

I am of two minds about it.

Elections, on the one hand, are usually hopeful events. Usually, nothing clarifies things like a broad vote with a good turnout. This time around I am clear enough about who I hope wins this election for President, yes, but more to the point I also feel we need a clarifying landslide for two reasons: For the winner truly to carry the day, and for our nation to begin some form of a healing process essential to moving forward.

Normally on the last Sunday in July, whichever way you lean in a presidential election, there is anticipation about the coming conventions. Never mind that conventions at some point became little more than television spectacles.

But not this year, and it’s not just the pandemic that has it all upended. The desperation of President Trump is observable now, almost palpable, on any screen.

So far, there is little that’s civil – and nothing fun – about this election of 2020. This November, we shall see how divided our country truly is. Because it will be the voters who tell us, not columnists nor pollsters nor politicians. This, to me, is the main reason to go vote in the first week of the November (or sooner) in this particular year. We all must.

That’s how the result will tell us what kind of country we have become? This November, we will see whether we have in fact changed as a nation, as many pundits tell us we have. And this is also why this 2020 election must be honest and fair and broadly participated in.

We fundamentally need to know if we have lost historic ground as a united country and have become, in our cities and towns, as extreme as the people on the evening news tell us?

(There is likely to be skirmishing, even after the votes are counted in this election, unless there has been a clear winner. Here I am thinking most about the Trump side. He has so inflamed his following, and so attempted to undermine constitutional government and also good journalism - all those traditional ways that we have seen ourselves clearly as countrymen and taken our country’s measure.)

Or will this election, as has happens in most of them, clarify that the greater number of our voters are in fact ready for a sea change back to good governance in Washington? That will be my vote.

As one American, my vote will be for a turn back to the center of the road, back to responsible and inclusive wise policies that elevate people, not the politics that is crass and low, venal and ever scheming.

What about you?

© Keel Hunt, 2020