An Open Letter from Vote Smart:
We are the champions. I know it is so!
It is not our elected leaders but our fellow American citizens who are finding the road to a bright and promising future.
No matter where you live, look at who is out on the line: nurses, doctors, care givers of every sort, firefighters, policemen, grocery clerks, the businesses stretching and then stretching again, or just Michael my mailman or the countless others sustaining your community and neighborhood.
They never ask about your politics; they know who you are.
Those are the patriots; they aren’t conservative or liberal they are just Americans helping Americans.
Like your Vote Smart staff, who just won’t quit, patching together their defense of facts from their homes from California to New York, they all know:
We’re better united than divided.
We are a nation of fairness where no matter how sick you are, you count.
Our democracy is as great as we make it.
When the virus is vanquished, they will all want what everyone wants, an equality of rights in tandem with an equality of responsibility.
Such sentiments, such traditions are sustained by education of the young or they are not sustained at all. The young simply do not know what you know.
They do not know a time when our elected leaders could be civil, could compromise, could collectively lead. They have been raised in a world of endless dispute, of opinionated partisan news and an enormous and tragic reduction in their civic and science education.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: I tremble for my country when I reflect that knowledge, facts, are all that we have with which to self-govern successfully.
When I think of these modern-day champions, these courageous defenders of you and me, I think, the light is still there, it is bright and beacons through the darkest of clouds. As a Vote Smarter, you are amongst those on that first burst of light.
Richard Kimball
VoteSmart.org President
THIS LETTER WAS STIMULATED BY THE THOUGHTS, WORK AND INTERVIEWS DONE BY RICHARD GILMAN, FORMER PUBLISHER OF THE BOSTON GLOBE.