One Vote

One vote. My vote would determine the fate of the World as we knew it. There was stacks of paperwork on my desk, I had already sifted through it multiple times. I knew it all by heart and yet I was genuinely torn. There was no easy answer in what I was being asked to do and yet everyone around me thought it was a slam dunk, yet they all had a different opinion of what I should do.

Impeaching the President of The Unites States is never an easy task to be given. It’s so much harder when your vote is the last one to be cast and the rest of the tally is split right down the middle. This was not the sort of thing that a Freshman Representative should have to worry about. These were the problems for those with much more experience than what I had, yet the elder statesmen had no such worries because they were all in bed for themselves. It was almost election time and their campaigns needed funding in order to get going.

How did the fate of something so large come to be the decision of one Little Joe Brown, no relation to the famous TV Judge, from Detroit? Basically because I listened intently to what was being said during the hearings, I challenged testimony that troubled me, and I looked at the cold hard facts. Had the POTUS committed treason? It sure seemed like it on paper but there was enough evidence to support him when he said everything he had done was in the best interest of the country.

It was during these proceedings that I learned that the evidence can say whatever you want it to. Sure many people will scoff at me and ask how I was elected without knowing that. I’m not a career politician, I was a simple teacher who wanted to do nothing more than help show my students how the Government works, yet I was the one who was learning the lesson. All it took for some of my colleagues to decide to go ahead with sending a man to trial and potentially having him removed from office, just because they didn’t agree with his politics.

The paper stared back at me, as if taunting me. It beckoned for me to make a decision but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It should be easy; there should be no question of what choice to make. As with everything in life though, there was this incredible grey area that hung on to my conscience every time I tried to make my choice. Long ago I had learned the fine art of deep breaths but they were no longer helping.

My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty, and my breath was shallow. There was no more time; I had to make my choice. Briefly I thought about going through all of the evidence one last time to try and find some little thing that would make my vote easier to cast. But I knew it all and there was no last minute surprise awaiting me in the pile. There was nothing that could sway me in either direction, my only choice was to follow party lines and vote to impeach.

Satisfied with finally having made my decision I moved to my desk and picked up the pencil, set it to the paper but found that I had a very hard time making my choice. Logically I knew that I needed more time to make my decision but the press would start showing up soon and I didn’t need those bloodhounds making my decision even harder to make. Those from Fox News would ask me why in the world I hadn’t cast my vote in the way they had wanted and on the other end of the spectrum CNBC would accuse me of being a puppet for the right wing and prolonging what should have been an open and shut case. If they only knew that nothing was as simple as they thought that it should be, there was more than politics involved in this.

This was one of the times when I wished that my wife was with me. She had passed on some years before, cancer had taken her away from me much too soon. My lovely Lila was always the voice of reason; she always knew the right thing to do. As if somehow her ghost was present with me, I felt someone slap me upside my head. My beloved was telling me that my choice, my decision was needed. The country needed to start healing after one of the most polarizing Presidents in the history of our country.

It wasn’t his fault, our fearless leader made choices that if others made it would celebrated as being bold and for lack of a better adjective Presidential. Yet for this one, half of the population thought he was the Anti-Christ looking to bring down one of the greatest nations in the history of the world. The other half felt as though he was fighting for them, he was one of them. Tensions ran high everywhere, the divorce rate climbed over the past 6 years of his terms.

It worried me that one half of the population would detest my decision and the other half would cheer it. Would they ever understand the amount of thought that went into this? No I don’t anyone would ever know the sleepless nights that this has caused me, nor do I think that they would really give a damn. Maybe I cared too much, maybe I didn’t care enough. That would have to be contemplated later.

In that moment I had a decision to make, a judgement to pass down and I knew in my heart what the right choice was. There was enough evidence to send the President to trial for treason. Yet when I looked down, my choice had been made:

NO!