Last week the political campaign continued its strange 2016 trip when Sen. Ted Cruz asked people to vote their conscience up and down the ticket and he was booed.
I repeat: Someone was booed for asking people to “Vote their conscience.”
Given it was in a room full of people wanting an endorsement of their candidate the booing wasn’t surprising. But in the days to follow other party leaders ripped Sen. Cruz for his statement asking us to vote our conscience.
That is absurd.
If you’re confident in your candidate shouldn’t you be trumpeting Sen. Cruz’s statement and pointing out that their conscience should point them to your candidate?
Now, ideologically, I am not a kindred spirit of Sen. Cruz, but I agree that all men and women should vote their conscience.
Isn’t that what we as Americans who put country first should do in every election? Aren’t we supposed to vote for the candidate that we feel is best qualified for the job, the candidate that believes in the same types of issue positions that we believe in?
Your vote is too valuable to not vote your conscience.
Our founders limited the vote to men who were property owners. It was a different time then, one when they believed only men successful enough to own property could be trusted to vote.
Many fought successfully over the years to open the right to vote.
With that hard-won right to vote comes the responsibility to do so responsibly. That right has been passed down to us by men and women who faced down hatred, war, murder, firehoses and attack dogs. Maybe we don’t value that right because in our day-to-day life we may forget the price that was paid, the painful history that brought that right to us.
Great men and women in American history sacrificed in many ways to secure and protect our right to vote. It is their gift to us, what we do with it is our gift to them. To have that vote and do anything other than vote your conscience is an affront to those who paid that price.
Make no mistake, no candidate is perfect. No party has cornered the market on good ideas and neither is without some bad ideas. To believe otherwise is foolish. We must open our eyes to that reality.
In coaching we used to talk about players who repeatedly blocked the wrong guy or chased the wrong player. We joked about them being like the fish that jumps on the first shiny object they see flashing across a pond. They bite without thinking.
Those fish are the first to be gutted, filleted and put in the frying pan. The patient fish watch, wait and evaluate. Above all they survive and thrive.
As coaches we spent a lot of time working to give those players the tools to stop chasing shiny objects, to make the right decisions in pressure situations. They learned and became better players.
It is no different for our society. An educated electorate that turns out to vote creates a healthier political system.
In 2016 we’ve heard so much about a broken political system. It is easy to simply blame the politicians.
Look deeper and see that we, too, are part of the problem. We’ve repeatedly dismissed thoughtful candidates who try to explain issues with answers exceeding our 140-character Twitter attention span. Social media as a news source conditions us to expect that complex issues can and should be explained to us in simple headlines.
The messy truth is real issues require complex solutions. They require more than insults or a headline and more than a sound bite. But that’s what we consume, and if that is what we reward with our votes we end up with politicians who respond to that simplistic worldview.
If we reward oversimplification we are the fish taking the bait, jumping on the shiny object.
It’s up to us. If we don’t change our patterns allowing headline writers to stir up division or social media to define the issues with the simplicity of true/false solutions we will not survive as a country.
You want politicians who work together? Look for both sides of an issue and educate yourself. Vote for ones willing to work across the aisle. Vote for ones who treat us like adults offering us issue solutions, or policy positions and then choose accordingly.
Be an educated voter. Yes it takes extra time. But is that such a steep price to pay back the debt we owe people who died to give all the right to vote? Is that such a steep price to pay to elect politicians willing to work with others to formulate solutions?
If we simply take the easy way out and thoughtlessly punch a straight party ticket, or we reward the most divisive candidates, we’ll be back here again complaining about politicians. We must understand that we too are complicit if we do not exercise our right to vote with the courage to vote with the convictions of our conscience.
In some ways Sen. Cruz did us all a favor, if only we’d listen. No matter how selfish or unselfish his motivations may have been, his call should be our call for all to “Vote Your Conscience”.
