Sometime between 1 am and 3 am I heard a slow, painful moan. It was my sleepless, anxious wife, blinking at the blue light and red hats on her computer. “Ohhhhhh, he’s gonna win…”
I mumble-begged her to come back to sleep. “You’ve got work tomorrow. Turn off the news. It doesn’t matter. She’s still got a chance.”
2 melatonins and 15 dumb sitcom on TV minutes later, she was back in dreamland. I joined her there, begging myself to believe “it doesn’t matter…”
It Doesn’t Matter
As I held my wife’s hand and my “it doesn’t matter” evolved into a snore, I soon found myself holding my wife’s hands years and years ago, sitting in the auditorium at PS 58 along with all the parents at the 2nd grade’s snore-inducing performance of “Character Matters” – a play extolling the virtues of great leaders in American history, George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Rosa Parks, each followed by the sing-songy chant of children holding their posters upside down, noses wiped with sleeves, and the teacher offstage whisper-hollering – “Character Matters!”
“It doesn’t matter,” my subconscious hollered back, echoing my previous words, twisting them into a different context, one of deeper truth in unguarded dreams.
Little Johnny’s Mom runs down the aisle to capture her son’s solo, camera flashing away, knocking over 3 hallway monitors and 2 grandmothers in walkers.
Emily’s Dad fingers-in-mouth whistles like a shrieking hawk one centimeter behind my ear after his daughter’s “Character Matters” bit (she got Helen Keller, probably the only person who would not be disturbed by Dad’s eardrum assault).
We rolled our eyes. It doesn’t matter.
Character Matters. It Doesn’t Matter.
My dreams flickered on, moving past PS 58 to echoes and shrieks from this presidential campaign. The shriek of meanness, the cruelty, the anger, the lies, the poor dogs being eaten by immigrants, the poor Johnny’s operated on in school without parental consent who come home as Emilys, the fill-in-the-blank dirty enemy betraying our country from within, the barroom banter bragging of size while making sure the women know the size of their role…
How it wasn’t just the electoral vote but the popular (this is popular?!) vote that chose to say character doesn’t matter.
Or maybe in some twisted way it does, if you choose the kind of character with no convictions save those he promises to throw out in court. It’s a choice to be led by that kind of character. It’s a statement that a character of angry bullying is the right character to lead.
And this is the character we choose. What a nightmare.
The Character We Choose
And I awoke to one recurring thought. Character matters. It’s the character we choose.
I kissed my wife, helped her get out the door to work and then sat down and straightened the puzzle of my thoughts. It doesn’t matter. Character matters.
With enough coffee came the realization that we have lots of work to do.
Work that shows the character we choose to be.
It doesn’t matter that others can choose meanness, can choose not to give a – not to care a – whit about knocking over grandmas or deafening your ears. I can choose to be otherwise.
Character matters, I said to myself as I caffeinated my neurons and flexed my digits. Character matters I said to myself as I typed away.
We have work to do.
Highlighting The Characters That Matter
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