Go Vote, Friends.

A guy in my office told me last week that he was no longer planning to vote. He is an extremely devout Muslim electrical engineer from Bangladesh now living in Jamaica, Queens, and until recently, he has been amongst the most ardent Trump supporters that I've known. Not to mince words, my friend is the king of "pulling the ladder up behind him." His earnest goal has been to be the very last immigrant allowed into the United States. 

However. He has recently begun to realize that amongst his fellow Trump supporters, he's not actually "one of the good ones". That, in fact, given the chance, they'll revoke his hard-won citizenship and send him and his entire family, including his native-born American children, back to Bangladesh. As a matter of reality, life has been getting steadily, progressively uglier for my friend's community over the past few weeks. In the last year, he's personally been targeted by a Latino gang. At a certain point, he connected the local mood to the national one, and here we.

But. My friend is religiously forbidden from voting for a woman. The dude is extremely devout. This created a serious problem for him. He is also ON FIRE about inflation despite my attempts to explain that inflation happens when you print $4T to deal with a pandemic (under Trump!), followed by a Russian invasion of Ukraine that destabilized global oil markets. 

Alas, my MBA in International Finance has been no match for my friend's rage over the price of eggs.

I said, "It's not my place to tell you who I think you should vote for. I have an opinion, and I don't think it's a secret what that opinion is. But you're going to make your own decision -- and you should! People died to give you the right to vote. YOU SHOULD VOTE! Don't take their sacrifice for granted."

At the end of the day, I believe in American democracy. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. We don't always win elections. We do try to come together afterwards to form a more perfect union. I believe in America, even when she disappoints me, which happens most days. We are struggling to be a better people, but we are not there yet. Still, we only lose if we stop trying.

No matter who you vote for, you're not going to be voting for my personal candidate today. Speaking personally, I am the last Bloomberg Republican on the face of the Earth now that Mike Bloomberg has himself re-registered as a Democrat. I don't care. I am a time-tested, data-driven, centrist technocrat, and I lived in and around New York City for every bit of Bloomberg's three terms as New York City Mayor. I know what I saw. More to the point, I was in a position professionally to appreciate how it was planned, how it was executed, and how it impacted New York City over the long term. So I *know* that good governance is possible even in nigh impossible situations. As Americans, we're all just accepting mediocrity and BAD governance, and friends, THAT IS NOT OKAY.

What can you do? 

At the end of the day, I believe in compromise more than any other principle in American democracy, yet I find myself living in a time of unbridled outrage. Having done about half of my MBA electives in marketing, I completely understand the sell by both political parties -- both how it's communicated and why. But we all stopped listening to each other almost ten years ago, so I finally gave up and stopped talking about it.

Truth is, when you're mad, you're not thinking straight. And you guys haven't been thinking straight in a long, LONG time. On both sides! That makes you conveniently pliable and more liable to donate money to the machine, and here we are. 

As Army QB Bryson Daily says, "Cool head, hot heart." 

Y'all are not passing that test right now. Today's politics are for HOT heads.

We're too angry. At everything.

People died to give you the right to vote. Use that. At a bare minimum, you owe it to the generations that came before us, who fought and died for us, to express whatever tiny bit of self-determination your vote represents. 

I would absolutely tell you who to vote for if I thought you would listen and/or that we could have an honest discussion about it. Since I don't think that, I'll just ask that you accept the result of the democratic process and reinvest in your personal communities tomorrow.

America can still be a shining city on a hill. But WE are that city. Do your part, help out, and try not to be an asshole.

Thanks, and good luck out there.