Gavel Gamut
By Jim Redwine
(Week of 10 November 2014)
SOMEBODY BETTER DO IT!
If you have been engaged in the happenings of Unanimous for Murder, Chapter 10 will appear next week. For now, my thoughts are on last Tuesday’s election; perhaps yours are too?
To those who garnered the most votes, congratulations and thank you for serving. However, the following comments mainly concern those who dreamed of serving but will not have the opportunity.
I do not wish to plagiarize, however, after William Shakespeare, all who write in the English language are plagiarists. Therefore, with a respectful nod to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Ifâ€, and to Teddy Roosevelt’s essay, “The Glory Belongs to the Man in the Arenaâ€, I offer the following without further apology.
Our sense of schadenfreude as aided by media cynics aside, we should come to praise those who wish to serve whether or not they win. And, if they do not win, we should still thank them for giving their time, resources and hopes for a better place for all of us.
Contrary to popular opinion, almost everybody who takes the difficult step of putting their friends, family and themselves through a political campaign does it for the best reason of all, they just want to serve.
Few public service jobs pay as well as similar private sector jobs and job security is in the hands of a frequently fickle electorate. Worst of all, even our most celebrated leaders have their lives dissected for any item of gossip that can be dredged up. Of course, those pundits, critics and coffee shop experts would never have the courage to put others first and run for public office.
So I say, and maybe you do too, thanks to those who run and are willing to run our governments at every level from bottom to top.
