In Our Dreams
George Bush and Al Gore walk out onto the stage and stand together before the podium. They take turns reading the following statement:
We stand before you today, humbled by our failure to convince you of the soundness of our individual candidacies — our visions and our characters.
Clearly, with such division over where America should be headed, we -- your chosen candidates -- must now work to better meet the needs of our constituency, the people of the United State of America.
Therefore, we pledge to work together, no matter who wins the final electoral contest. We owe that to the 95 million of you who exercised their most important democratic franchise by casting your ballot yesterday.
We need to embrace a new way of thinking; to reduce our competitiveness and increase our collaboration. To stretch ourselves beyond popular idioms; to search outside the box for new answers to the old problems that have festered in our political arena, lacking resolution, and inhibiting our growth.
We must deliberately shed the partisanship that has crippled all efforts at reform. We must restore faith in our campaign system, removing the corrupting, corrosive influence of special interest financing.
We must respect and celebrate our individuality, but also come together as a national community. Because we are more than another nation, we are the confluence of Western and Eastern cultures. We are the pioneers and the innovators, in social reform as well as technology.
But in order to justly and effectively wear the mantle of leadership, we must first clean up our own nest. We must provide food, clothing, shelter, health care, and opportunity to every human being. We must imbue every person with a sense of freedom and participation, of rights and responsibility.
This is necessary to assure a healthy and productive future for ourselves, our children, and their children.
We recognize that the people of our country are earnestly concerned about the direction of our one nation; the turn-out and the close results in electing the new Congress make this very clear. We also recognize that the division requires that we figure out how to learn to get along better, not only because it is the right thing to do, but the only way we can move forward..
Regardless of the ultimate decision of who shall serve as president, we both commit ourselves to working together, supporting each other, to realize the goals we all share — for a peaceful world, safe streets and homes, stimulating schools, and good health.
Politics is from the Greek meaning management of the community. Putting egos aside, we regain the purpose of our election process, which is not about not winning and losing but rather installing competent office holders to properly manage our inter/national affairs.
This is not complicated, once we remember our first obligation is to the future. To honor the Iroquois creed that all decisions government makes should meet the primary criterion of benefitting the sixth succeeding generation.
Ultimately, we will reach a level where we are meeting the essential human needs — where we have cleaned up our mistakes and are living lightly on the Earth — and then we can begin to discover why god has us all together at this same time on the old blue planet in the universe.
Won’t that be grand!
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.