By JOYCE ANDERSONRepublicans won’t save our republic.
My candidate won’t save the republic, nor will yours.
What happens in the chambers of the County Council, school board, and legislature have a more direct impact on our daily lives than what goes on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
How we choose to respond to life as it buffets and bruises us will have more of an impact on us and those in our circles, than what we see the influencers and famous tweeting, doing, or saying will.
How we each choose to involve ourselves in Los Alamos and New Mexico will be of more value and of greater worth than anything we read about going on in zip codes far away.
Please cast your vote, research your candidates and your issues, say a prayer if you like (I have!), and then let’s turn to our neighbors and see how we can serve them. Let’s turn to our community and see how we can fill the gaps, or step up to help. Let’s be involved by studying the issues facing our community. Let’s choose to disagree with grace, and agree with joy. Let’s choose to live by faith and not fear of whatever the future brings.
I am reminded of the words of Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, given 1963, also a time in our nation when we were deeply divided as people and on the brink:
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
