Is it going to be about love or hate? Facts or lies? Everything for a price or priceless values? The choice of leadership before us breaks down clean and clear just like that.

I’ve always lived by the admonition, “Whatever you own owns you.” Obviously that applies to things: homes, cars, digital devices, clothing, and anything else that requires maintenance and, eventually, replacement. It may also apply to other kinds of commitment: to people (friends, spouses, children) and to social relationships (religious or spiritual affiliation, organization memberships). Each and every one of our commitments owns us. It’s important to choose mindfully.

Of course, nobody gets to choose their birth family. Some of us get better options right from the beginning. For those people, the menu of possible commitments at first appears vast and confusing. Later on, part of maturity is realizing that choices do not remain endlessly open. With every commitment we make, the menu gets smaller and the chance to change our minds diminishes, until we run out of time. For me, an early commitment never to give birth changed the menu for the rest of my life. Enhanced or diminished? I have no way of knowing for sure.

With all this choosing available in our so-called free country, I have come to resist, and even resent, one particular feature of American life: What is actually up for sale is ME. My heart breaks at the amount of money spent on advertising, on the algorithms aimed at capturing my eyeballs and my brain. This marketing of me is almost inescapable, no matter how many ways I try to shut it out. All sources of information, all social affiliations, seem to come with a DONATE button. My power as a person resides, it seems, in being money that someone or something wants to lay claim to. Without money, I might as well not exist in this milieu of owning and being owned.

What owns me today? Who owns me today? Conspicuously, as election day looms, my country does. My entire life is on the block. And so is yours.

I have an obligation to my country and to my fellow citizens to resist being bought, and especially to being sold, by the U. S. Government. Government is commanded by the Constitution to “promote the general welfare,” not to sell our common needs to the highest private bidder. Clean air, accessible water, energy, communications networks, transportation, health care, nature preserves, bridges, and roads are all part of the general welfare we support with our commitment to each other as a country. So is military defense. None of this should be for sale to some entity less than all of us together.

A government that works for all of us together must be built on nothing less than love: love for humanity, for justice, for the opportunity of choice. A government that works for all of us must be built on facts, data, investigation, research, honesty, transparency. A government that works for all of us asks the question What is right? not Who can profit? A government that works for all of us does not discard any of us.

Is that kind of government “too expensive”? What about a government owned by entities other than “we the people”? If that were to happen, citizens like you and me would become persons to be bought and sold, another name for which is…