How to Pick a President
Tips with absolutely no strings or party affiliations
In September 2020, I found myself in a dark and deeply air conditioned old potting shed lying on my belly, pouring out my heart into my very first podcast episode.
We had ventured north to Montana and back again in the Airstream, landing on a lavender farm owned by friends in Grand Junction. We had intended to break free of our creekside pandemic condo and explore back roads and big skies.
It really was the best of times, and really the worst of times.
The world was struggling, and we had inadvertently purchased a front row seat to people living in the forest, pushed from their homes. Those who had once lived paycheck to paycheck, who now lived very simply - or tried to.
The biggest hole in my heart started in Lander, Wyoming, as we watched a family with small children live in a campsite in a very large tent.
When grandma pulled up in an outdated Volvo with rust stains and peeling paint to take the kids to McDonald’s, I watched mom lean into the open front passenger window and rummage through the ashtray for coins and salvageable remnants of cigarettes. The hole deepened in Montana, somewhere outside of outside, in an unregulated camping zone a remarkably young woman and her three year old ( sister? daughter?) lived beyond the kindness of strangers. She had erected an elaborate fairytale campsite with decor and streamers, and empty cans that could be festive by day and tangle aggressive wildlife after sunset.
We left them our food and all the cash in our wallets and headed south to a place where we could be insulated from the reality of the outside world as the fury of our inside world grew louder. And that's how I found myself at three o'clock in the afternoon, belly down near the carpet, speaking into my fancy microphone, telling the void how to pick a president.
It was the best of times in the way that the past can sometimes have soft edges and. And yet, it was the worst of times in that we were in significant political disrepair.
How to Pick a President is a methodology I encourage you to hold on to. It has served me in a number of cases. First, in how to pick a plumber. Because once you know how to pick a plumber, you know how to pick a therapist. Then, once you know how to pick a therapist, you know how to pick a president.
Sometimes we forget. We think that popularity is important, but it rarely is. Talent, training, experience, and ethics are my guidestars, and they can be yours as well, if they suit you.
When you think of a plumber, there are certain things that you need them to be able to do….
Talent: able to weasel in between the pipes, or behind a washing machine, or under the shallow porch behind the house.
Training is fairly prescribed, but could be academic versus apprenticeship or some combination of the two.
Experience is relevant when you own a home that was in existence before plumbing was added, and has since been retrofitted and updated. Having the experience to be there, to know how it may have been done, is more valuable than any training you could have had.
And ethics matter too, although sometimes we forget about this.
I lived once in a city surrounded by people of a particular faith, and they would signal to one another that they were in or out with images on their cars and business cards and websites.
Others use the Better Business Bureau as a proxy, or scan through Yelp reviews. What matters to you, aside from the plumbing? A plumber who shows up on time, or bills fairly, or will pray for you when you're both knee deep in the bad water.
The same principle, although different qualifications might make a great therapist. Maybe the talent that's important to you is listening, or loving confrontation. The training again can be so varied. What is a licensed clinical social worker versus a psychiatrist? And does that matter to you? Experience might be personal, lived experience. A shared quality of grief. A recovery path. A faith tradition. Or simply time in service. Perhaps you prefer somebody who's a bit fresh, or someone who has had a career’s worth of experience in another discipline. Their ethics might be a way of doing business, a cancellation fee, or a willingness to judge your behavior and not your identity. A softness or a rigidity that feels familiar.
It was in this off the cuff, unscripted, outlineless foray that I opened one side of myself as a channel to what I thought we needed to hear, or in truth, what I needed to hear. How do you pick a president? Because precious little was described by our forefathers, and almost nothing of the foremothers remains.
Did they trust us? The generations that followed?
Did they run out of gas?
I think about this now as I see ads, postcards, t-shirts, yard signs emerge into the neighborhood landscape. When I hear people describe what's important to them, I come back and think about this. I won't tell you what I think is important in terms of any of these qualities for you because I have no idea who you are and where you come from. But I know mine, and I encourage you to know yours. Should we ever cross paths in the reals, I hope you’ll tell me the talent, the training, the experience, and the ethics you think are required of this office. And those which are presented by the candidates at hand.
Curious for you to think about this. For me to think further.
Anyway, thanks for reading,
K
PS: If you are a US citizen and haven’t checked the vote.org website since last week, maybe just check or double check or triple check that you are registered to have your vote counted? It is more than a right, it’s a responsibility.