November 4th is Election Day! I firmly believe that it is our responsibility as citizens to participate in the governance of our communities by voting for the representatives and policies that align most closely with our values.

To illustrate: as a kid, my mom frequently presented me with the following options: you can either wear a jacket OR complain about being cold (hint: she wanted me to choose the first one). But woe unto me if I refused to wear a jacket and still complained! That was a recipe for a very annoyed mom, and she had good reason to be annoyed. The person who wants the world to be different (that is, better) and yet is not willing to do their part to bring about that different, better world is either lazy, irrational, whiny, or some combination of equally unflattering traits (as my mom has been known to say on occasion, a brat).

So if you have ever complained about the government, about elected officials, about existing policies, or the like (and the huge majority of us have), that shows that you already believe that the world could be different and better when it comes to governance. So you ought to do something about that if you can. Voting, like putting on a jacket, is for many (but sadly, not all) of us, one of the easiest things that we can do about it.

If you are unsure about which candidates are most deserving of your vote, I recommend visiting https://votesmart.org/voteeasy/. If you answer a simple series of questions about where you live and what you value, it will calculate which candidates in your district are most closely aligned with your beliefs, and give you all sorts of information about the candidates, the issues, and American electoral politics more generally. Don’t worry! Project Vote Smart is not aligned with any political party, PAC, or other special interest group, so you can be confident that they are giving you “just the facts.”