As my sense of good evolved and matured it came to me that revenge and retribution are great ways to carve away at your future assigning mortgages on the attention and intention of your aspirations. Which is why I can’t trust a leader who would sell his or her future and freedom to these two crippling emotions. Revenge and retribution are worse than a zero sum game. 

Public service is a vocation of passion and that passion can defy the cool limiting logic of zero sum. We need only to look at our heroes and role models who somehow managed to muster both courage and energy in such prodigious amounts that their services sometimes verge on the miraculous. We live in a time when we need to spend ourselves and our lives efficiently if we want to turn the corner we seek to turn. I sense in these past weeks our nation has responded to an unmortgaged free and positive energy with surprising enthusiasm even though that energy may have been short on the information of execution. We seem to need and respond to joy unbridled by bitterness and unhinged from revenge.

The larger picture of the world presents a scathing metaphor as well as tragic story illustrating the ineffectiveness and damage of the subzero sum game of retribution. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela knew the price revenge as a driving motivation and gave us alternative tools to use in times like these. The vote was meant to be a nonviolent tool of governance to parse out and delegate the power we no longer wanted to assign to kings and autocrats. The alternative to the vote seems historically to have been violence so lets keep the vote sacred by all means.