Voting With a Different Rubric

I haven’t yet voted. I am happily among the dinosaurs of this citizenry who still enjoy stepping into the voting booth on Election Day and penciling in my choices. As this impending opportunity approaches, I have been thinking about my rubric — how I decide for whom to cast my vote.  In elections past I have carefully reviewed the candidate responses to media questionnaires, noted scores on issue-based report cards, watched televised debates and read with interest the newspaper’s endorsements.  In elections past, positions reigned supreme. But I’ve grown weary of the mud wrestling.  And I’ve become increasingly disgusted by the moral fibers out of which those “representing” me are woven.  So, I’m changing the way I prepare to cast my vote.

While my interest in the positions a candidate espouses on the myriad of issues remains a priority for me, that consideration this time around has been demoted a notch.  After all, it is precisely this kind of blindered voting that has gotten us into the odious mess we are in. 

So it is that I have moved into the place where if “who you are speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you are saying,” the odds are good that you don’t get my vote.  This time around, then, I will impose a prior screen that has lamentably fallen into collective neglect.  In this election, and those that foreseeably follow, I will only consider those who: 

• to the best of my ability to determine it, keep their zipper up/skirt down, and their hands to themselves; 

• honor their spousal vows if they’ve entered them, and professional integrities, believing that if someone doesn’t keep faith with those closest to them I can’t expect them to do so with me;

• respect the validity of facts, even when they are inconvenient;

• have more than a passing acquaintance with the values of circumspection and humility; 

• demonstrate, beyond the campaign trail, a reverence for the sacred value of humankind and the world in which we live;

• pause to think and consider rather than jumping to immediate action; 

• can meet an opponent’s position with equanimity rather than ridicule;

• come from particular places and tribes but exercise the capacity to see beyond the parochial, not simply for the good of the moment but the good beyond their time. 

Only then, from among those who remain viable after such a vetting, will I consider their politics variously espoused.  

I know there are those who consider this to be an impossibly high bar for a candidate to clear — an assessment I find to be embarrassingly sad. To the contrary, I view it to be such a pathetically low standard so base that it’s hard to imagine how we could have possibly abandoned it.  Surely this is simply the least of what we should expect of each other.  

And tomorrow, in the voting booth, I will.  The days and years after, as well. 

Because another election is never far away.