Is there good left in us, and if so, how do we rediscover it?

I was watching a politician on television the other night, I won’t say which politician. I’m not even sure it matters; so many sound the same these days.

For every official bearing a message of hope, there are hundreds more dashing about like Chicken Little, trying to convince us the sky is falling. “Be afraid!” they exhort. “Be very afraid!”

They want us to be scared, nervous, uncertain. They want us to vote out of fear; fear of losing our unemployment benefits, Medicaid, subsidized daycare, our guns. They want us to believe that—should we be foolish enough to vote the “wrong” way—our very lives may hang in the balance!

The villains in their apocalyptic scenarios are myriad: Arabs, Mexicans, the poor, the rich, the atheists, the Christians, the right, the left; anyone who doesn’t think exactly like us.

Eek!

In my years as a reporter I’ve met my share of senators and congressmen, even had one-on-one conversations with a governor or two. I have discovered the following: They may be evasive, sneaky and sometimes downright dishonest, but they are not idiots.

When they campaign with negative scare tactics and misleading claims, they know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re doing it because it works. Because we continue to fall for it.

I’m thinking these unsettling thoughts because of a conversation I had with my daughter recently while dining at a nearby pub. The TV over the bar was broadcasting a documentary on the civil rights movement.

At one point, Martin Luther King came on, delivering from history’s depths, his “I have a dream” speech.

The bar quieted as heads swiveled toward the television, listening to Dr. King’s message of hope delivered nearly five decades ago from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“Let freedom ring,” urged Dr. King. “And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

“That always makes me want to cry,” my daughter said.

“Me too,”’ I admitted. “I felt the same about Kennedy’s ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ speech.”

“And Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” my daughter added.

We discussed for a while those brief moments in history when a single voice—Gandhi, Christ, Churchill—delivered a message of love, peace, strength, unity. Those moments when one voice whispered to our better nature, to that part of us that strives forever to reconnect with the divine spark that gave us our humanity.

As for me, I’m through being scared. You want my vote next election, Mr. Candidate? Don’t tell me the sky is falling. Tell me what I can do for my country.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.