Hey, World-Changer Families: Don’t Ignore Local Elections
Yes, my five Year old campaigned for a mayoral candidate in our small, Texas community.
It’s a blazing hot spring day here in Texas, and our neighborhood pool just opened. And what is my family doing for the day? Block walking! That’s right, block walking for a mayoral candidate. It’s local election time, and my husband and five year old son are out campaigning while I am at home with our napping two year old. They are conquering the heat and skipping the water extravaganza for two basic reasons. First, we want to teach our son the duty of civic involvement and the blessing we have in this nation to vote and serve our communities. Second, we recognize the significance of local elections.
I will never forget the first time I took my son with me to vote. He was still in the womb. I remember talking to him, as if he were an adult already, about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I also will never forget the next morning as I wept while talking to my bulging stomach – apologizing for having let him and his generation down by allowing now President Obama into office. I vowed in my heart that day that we would do everything in our power as a family to deliver this nation and this generation from the Constitutional carnage I knew would follow this tragic election. We’ve been taking our children to the polls ever since. And, yes, we vote in every election: primaries, local, national, mid-term, county, local bond, etc.
Our children already know the value of voting. They already understand that if those with conservative and moral values sit home, then anti-American, anti-God liberals win. Now is the time to train them to make a difference in their nation, state, and community by modeling the different ways they can be involved. They must fight to protect their God given freedom. No one will teach them to defend this freedom if we don’t since American schools are aggressively and unashamedly pushing socialism and morally bankrupt principles down their throats. So today’s lesson for our son is that we pick the candidate that most closely aligns with our values, and we support them in whatever way we can, even if we’d rather be at the pool.
Secondly, we never underestimate the importance of local elections. The City Council Members, Mayor, and School Board Members dictate the amount of money we pay in taxes, determine what businesses will and won’t contribute to our economy, and play a huge role in the education of our children. A couple of years ago our community voted to annex a Junior College that is based in Austin, TX so that students living in our county could pay the cheaper tuition rates. This naturally increased EVERYONE’S tax rate when it was voted in even though not everyone will take advantage of this service. I did the math following the election and discovered that 1.2% of the population had voted to raise everyone’s tax rate.
This same statistic holds true anytime a new bond is passed or a new city council member is voted in. In local elections, it takes very little to get voted in or get an issue passed or shut down depending on its popularity. As a “values voter”, I once thought that local elections pretty much revolved around economic and education issues, thus, for me, they were not as important, but that is simply not the case anymore. Look at conservative San Antonio, TX where the City Council passed a law saying that if a business owner had ever spoken out against homosexual marriage that they would not be eligible for a contract with the city. They stomped all over our free speech rights; therefore, we should never miscalculate the magnitude of local elections.
So the next time they are voting for the next Tax Assessor Collector in your county, don’t stay at home. Find out who is running and what they believe because what they believe will eventually find its way into your daily life, good or bad. You don’t want the 1 or 2% determining how you will live. However and whenever elections are held in your state, get out and vote and take someone with you – EVERY TIME. And just in case you are wondering if my five year old was upset about block walking instead of going to the pool, well, he was just thrilled to be doing something with his Papa. Doing something of value and learning something in the process was simply a side benefit. Beside, we made it to the pool after dinner anyway.
Image: Courtesy of: http://opinion-forum.com/index/2011/04/too-bad-kids-can%E2%80%99t-vote/
