Who We Are

I was sitting at a bar the other night, just leaning into the hum of the room. The guy on the stool next to me was easy to talk to—the kind of stranger you feel like you’ve known for years after just ten minutes. We talked about the local football scores, the best way to tune a mountain bike, and the weirdly perfect weather we’d been having. It was human. It was effortless.

Then, the shift happened.

He took a slow pull of his beer, looked at the news flickering on the TV above the spirits, and sighed. “I just don’t know how we survive four more years of Governor Sterling,” he whispered, his jaw tightening. “The man is a parasite. His supporters? They’re either blind or they’re trying to burn the whole state down. The system is rigged, man. It’s corrupt to the core.”

In an instant, the warmth left the conversation. He wasn’t looking at me anymore; he was looking through me, at a ghost.

We love to tell ourselves that story—that the “Sterlings” of the world are villains in a machine we can’t control. It’s a comforting narrative because it removes us from the equation. It turns us into victims of a broken system rather than owners of a mirror. But as I sat there, looking at this guy who was perfectly kind ten seconds ago and miserable now, I realized: the system isn’t broken. Governor Sterling is exactly who we invited to the party.

I think the system is working perfectly, better than ever before. The problem is: it represents exactly who we are.

The System

The reason we blame the “system” is that we treat politics like a product we bought that turned out to be a lemon. But politics isn’t a marketplace of ideas; it’s a machine of mobilization.

When you’re selling a service or a product, you have to educate the customer. You have to explain why your widget is worth $100, one hundred, one dollar votes. But in the world of Governor Sterling, there is no “charging more” for a better idea. You can’t get $100 worth of influence from one person; you only get one vote. To get another $1 vote, you have to move on to the next schmuck and get them to open their vote wallet.

Because of that, politics isn’t about finding the truth—it’s about finding the next warm body. It scales horizontally to the next guy, not up to the next dollar from the same guy. It’s about who can scream loud enough to get the most people out of their beds, and into a polling booth. And the reality is, more people mobilized for the last election than ever before. We didn’t get Sterling because the system glitched; we got Sterling because we, as a collective, decided he was the best bad idea we had.

The Mirror

If the government closely represents who we are, yet we still wake up and hate what we see on the news, we actually just hate what we see in the mirror.

When that guy at the bar called Sterling a “parasite,” he was really expressing a deep-seated frustration with his own neighbors, his own community, and ultimately, himself. We hate “them” but “they” are us. We are the ones permitting certain corruptions while decrying others. We are the ones choosing anger over curiosity.

If we hate the result, it’s because we don’t like who we’ve become. We blame the president, Senator, the governor, or the “rigged” machine because it’s too painful to admit that it’s actually our fault. The machine is just a high-definition broadcast of our own collective soul.

The Choice

As the guy at the bar kept spiraling into his despair over the state of the union, I realized I had a choice. I could join him in that basement of anger, or I could stay in the room.

I told him, “the truth is, I love my life. I was happy under the last administration, and I’m happy under Sterling. I don’t say that because I’m indifferent; I say it because I know that I only spent $1 on that election, I’m spending the rest on my happiness! I have a family I adore. We go skiing, we ride bikes, we love each other. I have a job where I do constructive things, and work with people I genuinely enjoy. These are the important things in life. I view my vote as a tiny pillar of my civic duty—a small thing I have to do—but I am not associating my personal brand or my happiness with it.”

I understand that everyone is just doing the best they can. They cast whatever vote they think is right, and I don’t have to hate them for it. In fact, if I hate them, I’m just looking back into that mirror and hating myself. Hate wastes a perfectly good moment. If you do it enough, it can waste an entire life. So, when you bump into some guy at a bar, or even at the next Thanksgiving dinner with family; remember that if the person starts vibrating with political rage, you don’t have to argue. You don’t have to defend Sterling or attack him. You can just offer a different path. Let’s raise a glass to that. Let’s toast to our neighbors, even the ones we don’t understand, and call it a day. Life is too short to be a victim of a system that is doing exactly what we told it to do.