This is one of the most most anticipated elections in the past 50 years…
There is a lot at stake in this election. We are being asked to choose between two very distinct views of where we should head as a Nation, and the path we should take to get there. The choices we make today should be well considered – they really do matter.
It’s easy to get swept up in the rhetoric and passion of the moment, and subsume our better selves to the less-than-civil conversation that passes for political discourse in our society today. We attack each other with sound-bites and slogans instead of debating our future with knowledge and reason.
And in doing that, we fail to honor the principles that our nation was built on…
With that in mind, I would like to share two quotes with you that will go in to the voting both with me today. Both are from John Adams, one of the most inspirational and intellectual of our Founding Fathers.
The first is a reflection on the personal responsibility we each have for the realization of a free society:
The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.
John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776
The second is a call for us to inspire and guide the next generation:
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 175
I believe these are words that all of us need to hear. They call us as both individuals and a society to become something better, and they challenge us personally to take ownership of making it happen.
Straight Talk about Change We Can Believe In has been around for quite a while…