It Has To Come From Us

So the election has happened, the votes are in and the results have certainly caused a wide range of emotions on every side, and in every corner of our country. Turn on the TV, open your social media channels, stand at the coffee pot at work, you will find despair, shock, jubilation, bewilderment, anger and fear in different mixtures.

I freely admit that this is so fresh everyone is still processing what happened, how it happened and what it all means for the country, and I am NOT a Political Science major, nor some form of a policy wonk…that being said, the reaction to the results that I see and hear makes me want to put forth at least some initial thoughts. 

A couple of foundational rules, perhaps to set your mind at ease as you read through this.

1.)    This will NOT, in any way, be an endorsement for any political party, figure or stance.

2.)    This will NOT, in any way, be an attempt to convince anyone to switch their political beliefs of support on either side of the aisle.

3.)    This will NOT, in any way, be a diatribe on whether the results of this election is good or bad. 

4.)    I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton is the devil incarnate, nor do I think that Donald Trump is the anti-Christ. I do believe, and have gone on record as saying, that both of these folks have severe character deficiencies…and that’s the last I will mention about either of them.

I firmly believe that how you and I respond to this, or any election, has a lot to say about OUR leadership abilities and maturity, even more so than what it says about the people that were running for the presidency. I also believe that our ability, yours and mine, to effectively and positively lead people within our day to day lives will affect the state of the nation, and frankly the world, more than any policy that a president or congress ever passes into law. These facts are why I believe it is proper to consider the following:

1.)    Neither the president we elect as a nation, nor the loudest voices within the country at any given time, nor all of the collected might of media both traditional and new, changes who you truly are…unless you let it.

Sometimes the majority opinion is right, and sometimes it’s dead wrong, that’s way it always has been and likely the way it always will be. Sometimes going with the flow results in amazing things happening, and sometimes going along with the crowd finds you in bad places participating in destructive things. The only way to know when to throw in with the pack, or when to stand against it, is to KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE AND WHAT YOU REALLY BELIEVE IN. 

No matter who sits in the oval office only one person stares back at you in the mirror…and THAT’S the person who has the most influence on your life, your happiness, your state of mind, and that governs your decisions and emotions. If, at your core, you are a person of compassion, caring, grace and mercy, that should in no way change no matter who holds power in our nation’s capital. If you value people beyond their opinions, whether or not they ever line up with your own, that’s worth far more than your guy/gal winning a political race. Don’t get lost in the rhetoric on your side of the aisle so deeply that when your side loses it causes you to abandon the person you are inside. If your candidate wins, don’t become arrogant and take delight in rubbing salt in wounds…and if your candidate loses, don’t lose your optimism and give in to despondency. Elections may cause you to reconsider your opinions, but they shouldn’t ever cause you to betray your principles. If the rest of the country says something that you feel is wrong is suddenly right that doesn’t mean you must now grit your teeth and fall in line, because that’s the surest way to harden your heart, replace your compassion with anger and confuse people with policies. Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself not taking a stand for a core cause, as much as launching personal attacks against “opponents”.

2.)    Even if you and I disagree on subjects, it doesn’t mean we have indelibly tarnished our relationship or rendered ourselves incapable of caring about each other.

Tolerance is a word that gets thrown around a lot in this day and age, never more so than in election cycles. Unfortunately, the word has lost all meaning beyond “I will accept you as you are, only as far as everything you believe lines up exactly with what I believe.” I had a family member post an article on Facebook tearfully explaining that it encapsulated exactly how they felt about the then upcoming election. The central theme of the article boils down to the fact that the author feels that anyone, including family members, who votes for the candidate that they against is doing more than politically offending them…they were “chipping away” at all of the trust within the relationship, and that it actually tarnished their affection for these people. 

The message of this article is, we cannot agree to disagree any longer. The sentiment is, if you and I cannot see eye to eye on EVERYTHING that I am passionate about, my love for you is weakened. In other words, my love for you is conditional, dispensed in full only when you will agree that I am right in all things. My trust for you is not predicated on your trustworthiness, it is dependent solely on your compliance and acquiescence to my world view.

That’s not a relationship, that’s manipulation.

When you come to a place in your life where you will only respect, love and care for those that subjugate all of their own opinions and principles to yours, then you have lost the ability to form, and keep, true and enduring bonds with a vast number of people in the world. You have traded genuine human interactions for self-placating and shallow associations, and in your efforts to homogenize everyone’s ideas and/or thoughts you will drive deeper wedges between individuals and foster the separation of people into labeled groups of two camps, friends and enemies. That sort of mentality and action rarely solves issues that plague our country, and both parties are guilty of fomenting this phenomenon.

Not everyone is you…and yet we can still live and succeed together. Sometimes, when speaking with people of different opinions, you might actually change your mind about how you feel about subjects of conversation. Sometimes you might change their minds about it…and sometimes you agree to disagree, but in all of these outcomes you can still respect and care for each other. It IS possible.

3.)    If you are looking to Washington DC for life role models, whether for yourself or your kids, you are likely looking in the wrong place.

I saw a lot of chatter going back and forth from political pundits and friends lamenting the fact that they didn’t know how they would ever explain to their children that they should not look up to these elected officials. It’s a tragedy they cried, that the people in these positions of power were not going to represent the very best of humanity, and they didn’t know how they would ever teach their children that they could not look to the Presidency, no matter who won, for role models that they should aspire to be like.

I would submit for your analysis that perhaps before you orient your child, or yourself, toward the White House to find someone to emulate you concentrate on someone closer to home.

When it comes to political campaigns, I remember in July of 2004 one of the candidates for president held a fund raiser that included a star studded guest list, the likes of John Cougar Mellencamp, Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Jessica Lange and Whoopi Goldberg. The entrance fee was thousands of dollars and the comedy at the expense of political opponents was notoriously vulgar. At the end of the night, the presidential candidate stood up and told the entertainers that they represented “the heart and soul of our country.” 

That’s a pretty powerful designation to place on a room full of disconnected and pampered millionaires. The whole lot of them certainly didn’t represent the heart and soul I would want to model, let alone have my kids look up to.

The problem with looking at politicians, celebrities of screen and stage, sports stars and authors as role models is that your distance from them personally, not necessarily geographically, means that you don’t really KNOW them. You only know the image that they can project, the act they can put on, the speech they can deliver flawlessly, but you are separated from their day to day actions and blind when it comes to any indications as to the true nature of their heart. These types of people may have a peripheral impact on your life in form of laws they pass that you must obey, or entertainment you may choose to pay to watch, listen to or read, but are you really able to say with any degree of certainty that you hope your kids will grow up to BE like them? You don’t really know who they truly are!

I’d much rather have my kids look at people close enough to them to really make a true, daily and pervasive affect in their lives…people that they can really KNOW and learn from, that will take personal time with them to teach them about right and wrong form their own experiences. People that will be there to pick them up when they fall, and show them what it looks like to rise above your circumstances with your principles and integrity intact. Kids hopefully find all of this first and foremost in their parent(s), their grandparents, their aunts and uncles…people that are human in every way, but are dedicated to helping them locate true north on their moral compasses and steering their lives consistently toward it. This is the role model that is most effective in changing people for the better…the ones that interact with you on a daily basis!

Please don’t look to the capital to find your role models, there are likely much more verifiable, inspirational and personal ones right in your own figurative back yard…and hopefully you are dedicated to becoming one yourself, the kind you want your kids to have!

4.)    No matter who the president is, the sun will rise tomorrow and your adventure will continue.

On Wednesday, November 9th, we all woke up to the sound of our alarm clocks, yawned and stretched, took a shower, poured ourselves a cup of coffee and went about the business of our lives that actually continues to drive the country forward. On our way to work, or school, or errands we may not really have paid attention to the fact that the sun was still shining, the air was still breathable and continuing to turn ever more crisp as we transition into the autumn season and everywhere we looked people all around us continued to live their lives. Hard working moms and dads were kissing children goodbye as they boarded the school bus, and those kids were still going to be assigned homework and taught the fundamentals of math, English and science. In other words, things went on as they have for decades, and likely the way they will go on tomorrow.

The secret here is that even while we are required to follow the laws of the land that get passed out of the halls of government, the real author of your life’s adventure is NOT the president of the United States. No matter who wins elections from now until the end of time, they won’t be scripting your emotions, positive or negative, they aren’t your source of hope or happiness…because if you don’t have those things nurtured innately within you, no elected official is going to be able to plant it there permanently anyway.

Don’t place your faith too deeply in government, or any magnetic, charismatic personality because when it comes right down to it we are all flawed individuals that try to avoid mistakes but can’t help making them at times. Everyone has been let down by someone in their life at different times, but the trick is to not become jaded and hardened because of it…principally because reality also dictates that YOU have let someone down because of your own failings…and that means that every single one of us requires grace, mercy and forgiveness as we continue to soldier on through our own adventures.

No matter who inhabits the White House, your everyday journey through life will be overwhelmingly happy and positive, or alternatively despairing and cynical, way more consistently because of how YOU CHOOSE TO BE AND ACT…it has much less to do whether or not your candidate won or lost.

I promise you that tomorrow the sun will rise yet again, and what YOU do and how YOU think personally will have way more impact on your continuing adventures more so than any occupant of the oval office!

Here’s the final thought.

It is fantastic to have causes that you feel passionately about, to be inclined to want to protect the incredible freedoms of our country, to be ardent in your beliefs…and to have the right to express all of these things peacefully without fear of reprisal. There are countries across the face of the globe where the same rights are NOT extended, and it’s likely the citizens there would dearly love to come here no matter WHO wins the presidency. Indeed, civil disobedience and righteous fights for justice have brought lasting and pervasive positive changes through the years of our countries existence.

Where things have gone off kilter is the idea that if everyone doesn’t think exactly like I do they have suddenly become more than human beings with the same rights I possess, they are now labeled an adversary…an enemy that must be insulted and subjugated through social media flames wars and in 60 second news bites. 

When you believe in a candidate and what they are espousing, and then they lose, it can be disappointing and feeling sad about that loss is perfectly normal…until disappointment becomes despair, or regret becomes rage, or momentary setbacks become deep seeded bitterness. There does come a point where you make a determination that no matter what you simply move forward and worry more about what you can control and less about what you can’t. 

On February 5th, 2008, a senator from Illinois named Barack Obama delivered a speech to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. It was an expertly written script which included the line:

“We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek…We are the hope of the future, the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided, that we cannot come together, that we cannot remake this world as it should be.”

He placed the onus of building the nation that we all want to live in not with the government, but with the people that make up that nation. The crowd of supporters went wild at these words.

Many months later, January 23rd, 2009 to be precise, Senator Obama had been newly minted as the President of the United States and was just three days into his first term. He held a meeting with congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle who were not seeing eye to eye concerning a massive stimulus bill that was moving through the legislative branches of government. President Obama obviously supported the view of his own party, against the desires of the Republican leadership, and the same man that had uttered those inspirational words a year before about bringing people together this time turned to House Republican Whip, Eric Cantor, and said:

“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”

Two very different tones, but he was absolutely right in both cases.

Elections DO have consequences, and when the people use the system and choose a leader, there will be a winner and there will be a loser. A winner has been chosen in this case, and that will cause some to rejoice and some to feel disappointed, but don’t forget that the other fact still remains that WE are the change we seek…but only if we really can get to a place where we:

• Strive to be the best versions of ourselves, no matter who wins.
• Stop demonizing people who don’t agree with our opinions.
• Stop looking outside to find role models and start becoming the role models we want the next generation to see.
• Stop ourselves from letting our political passions become our undoing when it comes to keeping our minds positive and our actions caring.

Remember the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, when he wrote the poem “Christmas Bells” that later became a beloved song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”, was grieving after hearing of the severe wounding of his son in the Civil War and the loss of his wife, who had died from an accidental fire. In the second to last stanza he laments:

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

It’s clear that there are people, after seeing the results of the election, that feel this way…that November 9th was a dark day of disappointment. Even now there are some responding to the loss of their candidate by contributing to the hate for the “other side” that won. If that were end of the song, what a sad thing it would be…what a hopeless place it would leave us as readers. Luckily, there is one final verse that concludes the matter.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am fully convinced of the truth of this last thought. No matter what side of the aisle you sit, we can together see days where the wrong fails and the right prevails. That won’t come from a Republican or a Democrat politician, policy, or victory it will come from US.

I remain hopeful that life will not only go on, but that the best moments of our lives are yet to come…not because of anyone in office, but because of the people in this country that will continue to take heart, remain humble, look up, stay kind and reach out...no matter WHO the president is!