Desire for leadership

Our family visited Washington, DC earlier this year. It’s striking to see our magnificent capitol and the monuments to our leaders and memorials for our citizens. It’s very moving to me to see these tributes.

Seeing these sites and reading our history reminds us that we have had truly great leaders who have truly inspired and led, enabling us to maintain our freedom. Millions of people throughout our nation’s history have sacrificed their lives as soldiers or perished as victims.

As I write this September 11, our citizens are deeply in need of inspiration and comfort, security and peace of mind. The images and trauma of this date are inescapable.

We should always remember the terror of this date, and we should demand more of our leaders to avoid another terrible event.

Is it too much to want our politicians to express ideas, plans, and hopes for the nation and not drag the opposing parties through the mud?

Where is our Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln or Roosevelt? If they lived in our time, would they want to run for office or remain in their homes? Would you want to expose your family to the treatment our candidates endure? Would you like to see some return to civility and decency?

It’s ridiculous for any candidate and his or her family to suffer the invasion of privacy we see as commonplace now. We as Americans should not tolerate it and we should send this message to the press: cover the ideas, analyze the events, and demand meaningful dialogue and debate. Let’s have unbiased reporting and accurate representation of the candidates’ plans. If you’re expressing an opinion, let it be known it’s an opinion, not fact.

We should not be dealing with what I consider to be distractions from the issues. I lived through the years of the Vietnam War and I remember the draft and dissention. I knew boys who signed up, some who were drafted into service and some who looked for any deferment possible. If you’re around my age, you probably have the same experience.

I would never judge anyone solely on the decisions they made at that young age. The current Presidential candidates are around 35 years past their time of service. Why don’t we acknowledge that people evolve and change, that few in their 50’s are as they were at 20?

Previous elections have used flag burning or prayer in school as distractions and that’s not being tossed around too much this year. Now we’re stuck in arguments about Vietnam instead of dealing with more pressing issues such as:

Stability for Afghanistan and Iraq and extracting our forces

Focusing on what’s happening with North Korea, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinians

Worldwide healthcare and disease crises – pandemic disastrous viruses, HIV and AIDS

Reasonable healthcare plans for Americans

The Economy

Civil Liberties

Environmental Issues

Education

Poverty

…just to name a few topics. We have huge international and internal issues to deal with, and we don’t need the distractions.

We have a lot of things wrong with the way we approach our elections, and I feel that if we focused on the issues and made some fundamental changes in election laws and in the ways we allow our candidates to be treated, we’ll get the leaders we really deserve. Maybe we’ll have great leaders earning their own monuments again.

And more about voting...

The San Jose Mercury News had an article on August 27 about single women not voting. There is an organization called "Women's Voices. Women Vote." You can read about this group at http://www.voterparticipation.org/.

Their research showed that 22 million women did not vote in the last presidential election.

I saw another article that said only 28% of women between ages 18-24 voted.

My mother knew the issues and was deeply patriotic, knowing that one of our precious freedoms was the right to vote, and that it comes with the obligation to be informed. She would get up early, drive through any kind of weather in order to go out and vote, and she was a great inspiration to me.

There is a website, http://www.vote-smart.org/. This is a non-partisan citizen's group devoted to printing the facts: "biographical information, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and interest group ratings."

Don't make your decision based on who looks like he'd be fun to hang out with. Don't base it on the best recipe submitted to a magazine, allegedly by the candidate's spouse.

Look at the facts and vote for the person you feel will lead us in the best direction.

Whatever your leanings, and I'm not inviting political discussion, get informed, be involved, GO VOTE. If you're too busy to take time during the day, you can vote in advance and mail it in. This is called an Absentee Ballot. Don't be silent - our country needs our brainpower!

America needs us - I mean all of us, men and women, all eligible ages, races, beliefs, religions. Our thoughtful voices can make a difference.

Precious and Hard Won Right to Vote

I'm not inviting specific political discussion here, but am posting this email this email from a friend. I thought it was important to share, and have also posted it on my website bulletin board. This is a great essay but the author is unknown.

For Women Everywhere
(The author of this essay is unknown.) ***************************************************
Do you ever wonder what to say to all those women who are considering not voting this year?

Remember how women got the vote...

The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty-prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 helpless women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic." They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled
Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a
heart attack.

Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women. Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there
because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of
it colorless slops--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders,

Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured
like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie "Iron Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I
could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. There was a time when I knew these women well. I met
them in college--not in my required American history courses, which barely mentioned them, but in women's history class. That's where I found the irrepressibly
brave Alice Paul. Her large, brooding eyes seemed fixed on my own as she stared out from the page. "Remember!" she silently beckoned.

Remember. I thought I always would. I registered voters throughout college and law school, worked on congressional and presidential campaigns until I started writing for newspapers. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president, I took my 9-year-old son to meet her. "My knees are shaking," he whispered after shaking her hand. "I'm never going to wash this hand again."

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes, it was even inconvenient. My friend Wendy,
who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was. With herself. "One
thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie," she said. "What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us
take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn." The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her "all over again."

HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunko night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."

Our right to vote was hard won, and the duty to vote - and vote intelligently, knowing the issues, is a duty of all American Citizens. Whatever your politics, LEARN AND VOTE!