Election Day 2008

Dear Children:

Today is election day 2008. As time goes by, some will want to cast this election as the most important in a generation or more. I want you to know that as I sit here this morning, I don't agree with that. Every election is important in its own way. One is no more critical than another. Whether its an election for mayor, sheriff, water district representative or president, what matters most is that you participate and vote.

If anything, what made this election important is that voters are paying more attention. And that's exactly what you need to do, pay attention. We have all seen what kind of leaders we get when do the opposite.

You need to vote because:

1. It's how you demonstrate that you are a responsible citizen.

2. It's respectful to the candidates who have sacrificed time with their families, friends and their own personal time to step into a hot spotlight to lead.

3. And, voting is how you pay homage to the millions of people over the past two hundred years who have bled, suffered and died so that you might have the legacy of freedom to vote as you see fit.

It matters not a wit whether the next president of the United States is Barack Obama or John McCain or Barney the Purple Dinosaur. What matters most is that your voice is part of the chorus. It's fine to be frustrated or even cynical about the process we go through in this country to elect our leaders. It's very chaotic and dynamic, multivariate and even maddening. It can also make you want to just ignore it and cloak oneself in apathy. And, many do.

Your father must confess that he waited until the last possible moment to vote in this particular election. At one point, I was so disgusted by the volume of vacuous media coverage, that I actually considered not voting at all. For someone who has been politically active and aware since the age of eight, that was a bit of a surprise.

Our media decided a year ago that the country needed Barack Obama, so it seemed that if I voted for Obama I would be a just one more tool of the manipulators in the media. If I voted for John McCain then maybe I'd be throwing my vote away. After careful consideration, I made a decision to consider one simple issue first before all others. That issue for me was/is my own subjective measure of each candidate's honor and integrity. Honor to himself, his family, and his country. Honor to something bigger than himself. Integrity in his ability to sacrifice himself repeatedly for a higher purpose.

None of the candidates could reach the high bar that your grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles set long before you arrived in this world. Those people put their families before themselves time after time and gave me thousands of reminders of the value of honor and integrity and sacrifice. Political candidates more often than not consider themselves over their families. Running for and holding a political office is extremely time-consuming and requires a significant sacrifice. Ambition is not the best trait for leading and nurturing a family. So, it was challenging to pick through what was left.

In the end, the candidate I chose was deeply flawed, but their honor and integrity had been long-tested, is consistent and more substantive than their rivals and their record shows that they are willing to consider the greater good over their own ambitions a good deal of the time. I'll let you determine who that was. In America we have the right to keep our vote private and I intend to do just that. Who I voted for is not nearly as important as voting itself.

Our country is not perfect. It is the sum of its parts; imperfect people generally all striving in cumbersome unison for a few noble ideas. Those ideas include protecting freedom and free choice and the need for humans to maintain a voice in how their lives are organized, managed and led. It's your job to stay involved in your democracy no matter how much you might find the effort inconvenient, irritating or even insulting. Your vote does matter and it counts.