Vote! It’s Your Civic Duty
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is October 26, 2024.
Earlier in my career, I paid attention to politics during major election cycles, but after an election passed, I went back to my preferred state of blissful unawareness and baseline trust that both political parties were managed by functioning adults who had the best interests of the United States Constitution and the American People in mind. Back then, it was the norm for politicians to work across the aisle and it was only the fringe elements of both parties that refused to work together toward common goals.
Fast forward to the 2010s and bipartisanship was dying a slow and painful death. Today, bipartisanship on life-support and is the exception and not the norm. Lawmakers who do reach across the aisle are routinely punished and ostracized by party leaders. Fringe elements of both parties have become more mainstream, lending both voice and power to those who want to tear our system down for their own personal political gain.
Exacerbating matters is the fact that our information sources are heavily biased in one direction or another. FOX News, OAN, Newsmax, and others are unapologetically tightly aligned with the political right. Commentators routinely contort themselves and their on-air narratives to fit with the wishes of Republican Party leadership. MSNBC is an example of an information source that bends over backward to align with left-wing factions of the Democratic Party. Added into this stew is the fact that foreign governments are now actively involved in attempts to sway the outcomes of our elections. In this environment, no one wins and the primary casualty is the political critical thinking skills of the average American voter.
The point I’m driving at is that we can no longer be casually involved in our political system. We must recognize that most of our information sources are biased and that making informed political decisions takes real work. The bias that’s all around us makes it incredibly easy to get lulled into sense of false security that your tribe is giving you facts and truth when what they’re really providing is half-truths, misinformation, cherry-picked facts, and, in some cases, blatant disinformation.
My ask of you in today’s Muse is twofold:
Vote and make an informed choice. It’s not enough to ask your buddy at the bar or family member who you should vote for. Put in the work. Do your own research. Engage with non-partisan information resources. Fact check the positions and statements that politicians are making. Recognize that in many cases, you’re being played and manipulated for clicks and views. To do this, visit trusted sources like FactCheck.Org. With the rise of fringe elements in both parties, conspiracy theories are everywhere. It takes effort to dig for the truth on an issue that you care about, but by employing your 5 Whys training to get to the root cause, you can cut out a lot of the noise in most signals.
Vote and keep in mind that it’s not cult of personality that you’re voting for. It’s not a political party you’re voting for. As a US Citizen, it’s your obligation to defend and support the United States Constitution. Fun fact, the framers of the Constitution were terribly afraid that political parties would fracture our nation and tear us apart. It should be Country over Party and not the other way around. Here in 2024, it seems that we are as polarized as we’ve ever been. We’ve divided ourselves up into like-minded tribes and are at risk of losing what makes us unique as a nation—our ability to leverage the richness and diversity of our population.
The mindset that I like to employ when I’m deciding on whom to choose in an election is to put myself into the shoes of an individual who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. Active duty members of the military and veterans understand this. They took an oath to the Constitution and some have laid down their lives for it. Will my vote respect their sacrifice? In the current political environment, the opinions of John Kelly, Mark Milley, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and others carried a great deal of weight regarding the box I checked on my Wisconsin absentee ballot.
To clarify your positions on the issues, I recommend that you write them down. I’m a big fan of putting pen to paper to create internal clarity, and to balance emotion with objectivity. For an example, please see my previous Muse on my political positions from August 2024.
I’m a proud American Citizen. I love America and its ideals: that we are all created equally; that there should be liberty and justice for all; that we can live our lives freely as individuals without fear of retribution or reprisal if we don’t conform to someone else’s idea of who we should be and how we should live; that we are a beacon of hope and light in the world; that we can and will disagree, but at the end of the day, our vote is what matters and that we accept the outcome of free and fair elections.
Are we perfect? No. Is the great American experiment in democracy worth defending and protecting? Yes. How do can we do that? Open your mind; break free of your information cocoon; get informed; know the difference between entertainment and hard, unbiased journalism; build your critical thinking muscles; don’t worry about what your friends or neighbors will say about your vote; and then VOTE on November 5th.
Oh, and January 6th, 2021 was not “a day of love,” but was instead a heinous attack on American democracy… Let’s do everything we can to avoid a repeat of that day.
Grace. Dignity. Compassion.
