The Future of America

You may not feel the need for an article like this. It could be that you have decided not to vote at all in this election, which is just over two weeks away. Or it could be that you’ve decided how you’ll vote and nothing will change your mind.

But in the not-too-distant-future, the opportunity to change your mind about whether or how to vote will be gone. So allow me to ask for a few minutes of your time to consider some things.

It should be no surprise that “doing good” will be at the heart of this. You undoubtedly like the idea of doing good and in fact do good often. On behalf of the world, thank you for that.

Of course now and then there are differences of opinion about what is good and what is evil. In cases like that, there has to be an outside — and ideally objective — standard to which we can appeal.

Finally, we also use these two phrases, and they might come into play in an election: The greater good and The lesser of two evils.

Vote

No matter who or what you vote for (candidates and propositions), please vote.

Every election, even in our quadrennial presidential elections, there are millions of registered voters who don’t vote. In the last presidential election (2020), about 75 million registered voters did not vote.

Here’s a quote on that from an Associated Press article:

According to a study by the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, more than 75 million people eligible to vote — including nearly 35 million Black, Hispanic and Asian American people — did not cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

The positive number, though, was that even with those missing votes, the voting-eligible people who did cast a ballot was the highest in decades!

Being able to vote and not voting is not evil, but it’s a failure to do good. It is a failure to speak into the life and culture of America, or to stand for your position on an issue.

The AP article also investigates why some people don’t vote. Some have a personal reason not to vote (e.g. they don’t like either candidate), and some can’t navigate the process. There are those who think their vote doesn’t matter.

For me, the higher the vote count, the more I think the will of the nation is being heard. The bigger the number, the easier I feel about the results. So please, if you can, vote. It’ll make me feel better.

Leadership

One topic I haven’t heard much about in this election is leadership.

You might not have noticed that it was missing, what with all the talk about this or that issue. I get that, because the issues (next section) appeal to our emotions, and we love living in our emotions.

But here at Do Good U we think about leadership a lot. In fact schools and businesses regularly engage us to teach leadership. We work with executives, students, and everyone in between, because leadership is a big deal.

Coach K (the famous Mike Krzyzewski, with 16 championships and 6 gold medals), says, “I think leadership is the least taught occupation that there is in the world, but it’s the occupation that transcends every occupation.”

Leadership is far from being the least written about occupation. In our Do Good library we have dozens of books on leadership. I can’t imagine how many articles we have. But we agree with Coach K, leadership is rarely taught, even though it is transcendent in its importance.

So, among the candidates you’ll be voting for, who is a leader worthy of your followership?

One of the characteristics of true leaders is this: they have a vision for the future and can articulate it. No vision, no leadership. That is the kind of thing we did as teenagers. “Let’s all get together and go somewhere and do something.” It’s a crowd, not a leader with followers.

Every leader leads in context. A battlefield leader may have different skills than the president of a nonprofit ministry. Coaches of grade school athletes might have different personalities than professional coaches.

Effective leaders aren’t always liked, but they always lead the way. Follow anyway, if that leader is going where you want to go.

Issues

OK, get your opinions out, but don’t leave your mind behind.

On the national and state level there are several issues to consider. The biggie for me is abortion, but the biggie for you may be the border, or foreign relations, or the economy.

A lot of the election ads are about those issues, and that’s understandable. Issues are important, and what we do with some of these issues might well outlive those who get elected.

Here is what I’d like for you to do with all of the issues you can think of in this election:

Ask yourself which side of that issue is good, and which side is evil. Then support the good.

The challenge is that good and evil are not always crystal clear. Christians will tell you that is because Satan (evil) himself often appears as an angel of light. In other words, things that are evil are made to look good.

When it comes to abortion, I get that there are cases when it is necessary — though still sad — to end the life of an unborn child. It was Bill Clinton who said (in 1992) that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” In her own presidential campaign in 2008, Hillary Clinton echoed that and said, “and by rare, I mean rare.” At this year’s DNC, she dropped the “rare” part altogether.

Some say it is a moral good for a mother to be able to choose to end the life of her child. Mother Teresa said, “If a mother can kill her own children, then what can be next?”

Here is a choice for us all: to stand with good and against evil. Sometimes that choice is very, very difficult. Even then, choose good and do good.

It’s in you.