Character should matter

Aspirations matter almost as much for a job aspirant as do achievements, especially in situations where the past is anything but prologue. Moreover, character must mean more than culture. Otherwise, why have antidiscrimination laws? Anyone who would, for example, defame or discredit a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr., knows little of history and even less of the human condition.

Where is it written that we are required to exclusively value what was, rather than what can be? When we vote and hire a public servant for a multiyear term, we not only express trust in that person’s abilities, but also his or her personal and world views.

If those views are painted on by party affiliation, I consider that they are of less value than if they have evolved through meaningful and positive experience, even if not all of it has always been purely “successful.”

Besides parties, a candidate may display, espouse, or advance a philosophical bias. As a strenuously independent voter, I try to make choices based on a range of things.

I have not yet decided what “values” means, but I suspect what one is saying when that is invoked is that somebody looks for public servants who are pure knockoffs of the person in his or her mirror. Mistake. If that’s desired, one should run himself or herself. Cloning is not yet feasible, thank goodness.

From 40 years of voting, I believe I can label people with the best of them. Liberals differ from conservatives in that the latter seem to focus on who’s wrong. The former tend to look at what’s wrong.

Think about that. Conservatives don’t sound like any kind of solution since the mid-1990s, or the “Con

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