The Candid Candidate

The Palmer City Journal                                                          A Perspective on the Election

American children learn the story early.  "I cannot tell a lie, the young George Washington says to his father.  "It was I who chopped down your cherry tree. "A wonderful myth, and yet one that must be profoundly etched in our collective subconscious.  How else does one explain the tumultuous, improbable reaction to our latest mayoral hopeful?

It has been something less than two weeks since Jack Wood announced his candidacy for mayor and said in effect the same thing.  "I cannot lie to you."  The utter strangeness of this pronouncement flabbergasted one and all.  But somewhere deep inside us, in that long forgotten world of Easter Bunnies and Santa Claus, the sleeping child within us stirred.  For we were raised on the belief of truth and justice being the American way, on the idea that good triumphs in the end, and on all the myths that all cultures teach their children to morally arm them for the realities of life.

When Mr. Wood first made his statement we alternated between feeling sorry for him because of his unfortunate accident, and great glee at the spectacle he was providing for us.  And when the eminent doctors and psychiatrists confirmed that the statements of his condition were accurate, we decided they were as crazy as he.  The cynicism of adulthood does not yield lightly.

But then many of us started thinking.  What is it we ask for in our elected leaders that they never seem to give us?  We are willing to overlook the petty wheelings and dealings. We are willing to excuse the mistakes that occur.  We accept the ineffectual and incompetent attempts at balancing budgets, providing services, solving problems.  We are tolerant of the legal graft, even of the corruption that inevitably accompanies government.  Such is the degree of our own cynicism.

What we are tired of is being lied to in the process.  We are tired of seeing officials come hat in hand at election time seeking our votes, and then playing medieval barons to our peasantry in the interim.  We are tired of hypocrisy although we accept it as a given.  In short, we are tired of not believing in the myths we were raised to believe in; so tired that we have blocked them from our minds and accepted those inequities as the way of the world.

Then comes Jack Wood.  And against all of our better judgement, against all of our adult wisdom, against all of our experiences that tell us we should know better, we start to believe.  We start to believe in the power of myths.  We start to believe again in what we were taught as children.  We start to believe because we want to believe.  The power of childhood dreams, the power of hope isn''t dead after all.  It has only been sleeping.