“We all know that Democrats are evil.” — Anonymous Facebook poster

The poster above wasn’t really anonymous, but I didn’t want to besmirch her good name by posting this for everyone to see. We often post on friends walls and simply assume everyone that reads it thinks like we do. Beyond the more global implications that we will get to in a minute, I had to grapple with the fact that someone was calling me evil.

Language is a precise thing. I’ve been trying to teach my daughter that ever since she was little. We correct her grammar. We correct her spelling. More than anything, we correct the syntax that she uses when making statements and asking questions. Words matter. One can’t help but have a tiny bit of introspection when something like this happens. Am I writing off thousands of people as evil myself?

The midterm election results are still flowing in. We probably won’t know the exact breakdown for a few days, but it seems that we have more or less maintained the status quo. There might be an isolated senator here or a representative there, but the numbers should roughly shake out about the same. Of course, how anyone interprets that is clearly up to them.

In fact, the battle in Georgia is prominently on my mind. It pits Raphael Warnock against Hershel Walker. One of those is a minister that most people say is a good man even if they disagree with his stances on the issues. He is thoughtful, intelligent, and caring. His opponent is none of those things. Maybe Mr. Walker was intelligent at one time. Maybe his brain was irreparably damaged from years of concussions on the football field.

Even the most hardened of Democrats, liberals, or leftists have to feel sorry for Walker. He was clearly used for his fame and name recognition in spite of the fact that no one could claim he has any business being near the Senate. That race is almost even as I write this. I’m not sure which way it will go and that thought is absolutely frightening. It means that nearly 50 percent of the voting public either think substantially like the woman above or don’t think at all.

Either way, we have to acknowledge eventually that we are electing people. Our democratic system isn’t built to elect ideologies. It was built to elect people. Maybe in some places you could pull the lever for red or blue and simply trust the party to appoint the right people accordingly. We don’t live in one of those places.

Perhaps, we have been far too eager to defeat an ideology and have allowed ourselves to vote for bad people because we see the other side as the enemy. I also know this is an gross simplification of the problem and steers us into “both sides” territory. Perhaps that is part of the problem altogether. Perhaps one side is doing this far more often than the other. At this point, I have to admit that I am biased and therefore not completely capable of arbitrating this point.

These are all fair criticisms and all points of view are welcome. The point is that someone like Hershel Walker shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near Washington. He never should have gotten this far in the first place. An election is a decision between two or more people. As citizens we need to elect the best among us. If we want the best possible government then we can do nothing less.