After the voting ends the hard choices begin

The good news: your voting this month, or next, helps power Washington to near a top 10 rank of electoral participation in the country. We are 12th, below Virginia and Florida. Good but not great. Turn your neighbors out to help us do better

La Conner is consistently a top Skagit County precinct in Skagit County. Yea for our corner of the world.

The difficult news: We all face hard choices. If your slate is all the best candidates and all the initiatives turn out the way you want them to, consider that you will wake up Wednesday with your state and country having the complex challenge of following through on the campaign rhetoric the winning side/s spouted all these many months.

The hard to swallow news: all your great and correct votes did not solve anything. The winners have not even made a down payment on their bet that better days are ahead. In fact, for all of us, winners and losers alike, it is almost certain that the path to better days isn’t even being trod. We are not at that trailhead. We are not even in the parking lot. Indeed, we have not yet packed, much less have mapped out the car’s route, much less gotten in the car.

It is not the tough decisions that take all our political will and exhaust us physically, financially and emotionally that slow us down. The actions, the generations of hard work that open the door to change and offer the path to a sustainable, sensible future, that is a lifetime of effort that we have not even named, much less believe.

Consider: there are 74 orcas in the Southern Resident Killer Whale population. What life changing paradigm on our part provides this species survival?

Consider: carbon dioxide measures 400 ppm in the atmosphere. The level for life as we want it, the good old days, is 260 ppm. The difference is 140 ppm. That is a 35 percent decrease, over one-third. What new normal does it take to get to a 35 percent reduction of anything?

These words, this rhetoric, are not a matter of raining on anyone’s parade. It is a matter of folks not even believing in the direction in which they must march. And they dispute the weather forecast.

The path to survival is not certain.

Bet on it, vote on it all you want. Survival is a route we have to create through a wilderness we call 21st century civilization.

And, if you haven’t voted, vote. Vote as if your life depended on it. Indeed, all our lives do.