My Vote

I am one of those that vote for ideas and for hope. I vote for decency and the idealistic American values we like to think are our heritage and our future. I vote for a future that is hopeful and not fearful.

I do not vote for party. I think voting for a party takes my brain out of the equation. For four years now, America has been waiting for their “better angels” to lead us into the future. It has been a hard wait, not made any easier to bear by the abandonment of American values and sense of decency by the current president.

I look to Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in 1861 for my anchor. Lincoln said in this First Inaugural Address:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when touched again, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I voted with “our better angels” and for our future as a nation with a meaningful role and place to fill among the nations of the world.