Elections...

One thing you can always say about elections. You know that at some point, the turbulence, the debates, the commercials, and the mudslinging and arguing will be done. At some point, the votes will all be in, they will be counted (and yes, sometimes recounted), and then we will all move on.

So it will be in my small town of Eagle Mountain. I voted today. I think I voted pretty intelligently. I don’t mean to imply by that statement that my vote was the only intelligent choice. What I mean is that I did take some time to study the issues, the candidates, and then made a choice based on what I learned. Time will tell, really, how intelligent the choices really were.

I’m always a little bit smug and proud of myself when I vote. In some ways, I shouldn’t be, but in other ways, I like wearing the little “I Voted” sticker they gave me. I like being part of the process. And I liked being a part of the small-town process. Back when I lived in West Jordan, I almost never voted in civic elections. In fact, once, I decided I was going to, and then spent an hour or so searching for the polling place. I never found it.

I guess that now that I live in a new city, and I really feel like I can make a difference, I want to be involved. I want to be a part of it.

MRKH
Mark Hansen
http://markhansenmusic.com

Ah, small-town politics…

As I mentioned a while back in my blog (sort of as it was happening), I moved out to Eagle Mountain almost exactly a year ago. By and large, I’ve loved it out here. Our new house is great, and getting better. I’ve found some good friends, and my boys have friends by the ton over at our house every day.

Tuesday is our election day. We’re voting for a new mayor and some city council members. And it’s been an interesting fall, too be sure.

Let me set this up for you: No mayor, in the ten-year history of this small developer’s town in the countryside of Utah, has ever served a full term. Not one.

The current sitting mayor was really an interim. He was appointed by the city council to take over after the former mayor faced charges of mishandling city funds. Our current mayor is actually a pretty nice guy. I wish he was running. But he took over with the understanding that he only wanted to be an interim mayor. He would do all he could, but he would not run for election. He made that very clear, primarily by not running.

So, now we have two choices. And one of them is following in a long-standing tradition of crookery. About two weeks ago, it was revealed that he was being investigated for real-estate fraud. Of course all along he was pointing the finger at his competition for being “in the pockets of the developers” and not keeping the interests of the city at heart.

About a week ago, he actually admitted to the charges, and was fined some $40,000 by some real estate board, and lost his real estate license. There was a news report interviewing some of those that were the victims of his fraud, now left with destroyed credit ratings and mortgages they can’t pay. One of them, surprisingly, was the family of his own daughter and son-in-law!

And yet, for some reason, he still seems to think he can continue to run for the seat! I have never seen a politician with chutzpah like this, I have to admit.

Meanwhile, there is still all kinds of mudslinging going on between him and his opponent. His response to the publicity has been that it has all been politically driven. I guess it was his opponent that made him cheat on the documents and artificially inflate the prices of the properties they forced his son-in-law to pretend to buy for him. But his opponent is supposedly owned by the developers that own Eagle Mountain, and if she's elected we can say goodbye to city parks and open spaces.

Then someone else (we're not sure who just yet, both sides blame each other) took out an ad in our town newspaper pointing out which candidates for mayor and council were happily married and which ones had been divorced. Because, that, of course, indicates how well they would run our city, right?

Don’t these people realize that this is a small town? After this is all done, we all still have to live together. We’re all still going to be neighbors, after all. Crazy…

MRKH
Mark Hansen
http://markhansenmusic.com

Thanks, Alex…

I was listening to the “Cricket and Seagull Fireside Chat” for this week, hosted over at Meridian Magazine. The guest is Alex Boye.

This guy constantly amazes me. I love listening to him tell about growing up in England, joining the church, singing in the boy band, and then coming to America and singing solo here. Now, he’s a married man and singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And he just put out another CD. Pretty good stuff, from what I’ve heard of it.

One of the things he said in the podcast, though, struck me pretty hard. He talked about how he started to get famous in England in the boy band, and how that was getting more and more worldly, leading him away from God and the Church. And how he wasn’t sure what to do after he quit, but that he’d put it all in God’s hands. He said, when he’d tried to run his own life, he’d made a mess of it, and so he turned it over to God, and it became much easier.

So, I’m wondering how to do that?

I’d imagine that if I want to do what God wants me to do, I’d have to pray a lot. Otherwise I’d not have any idea what it is God wants me to do in the first place. I’d have to do the things I already know God wants me to do, like love my family and my neighbors, keep the commandments, and all that.

I keep wondering what would come next? Maybe if I do that stuff, the other things I worry about on a constant basis wouldn’t be quite so worrisome. Like whether or not I’ll have a job next week, or whether or not my current salary is gonna be enough. Or whether or not anyone’s downloading my songs, or when I’m actually gonna finish a new one.

Hmmm….

MRKH
Mark Hansen
http://markhansenmusic.com