By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
Over in Japan, there’s a tradition I can’t stop thinking about. It’s called kintsugi. When a bowl breaks, you don’t toss it. You don’t hide the damage. You glue it back together with lacquer mixed with gold, so the cracks shine. The break becomes part of the story, maybe the most interesting part. There’s a philosophy behind it, wabi-sabi: imperfect, impermanent things are worth honoring.
I like to think of America as one of those bowls. Handmade, a little lopsided, full of every flavor and spice that ever got off a boat, crossed a border, or drove in from the next county. And boy, has it been dropped a few times. The gold is our humanity: we can be broken, and with a little handiwork, we can be fixed.
We agree on more than we let on. What we don’t always share is a language. Somebody from Portland, Oregon, and somebody from Portland, Maine, might have the same bones, but they ain’t speaking the same dialect.
By the time you read this, the midterms are over. Somebody’s celebrating a wave or simply staying alive. Somebody’s sure the country just went off a cliff. Whichever side of that you woke up on, here’s my ask: before we sweep up the pieces, let’s take a peek at the cracks. They might be where the gold goes.
I’ll go first. We just celebrated Halloween. We said thanks for the candy. But did we skip houses with yard signs we didn’t like? I’m guilty. I’ll walk past a house with certain political signs on the lawn. Not because you’re a bad person, but because I’d rather skip the conversation. That’s on me. That’s a crack, and not the good kind.
Can we all agree this election season stunk? Our mailboxes were full of crap. I got three texts a day about some candidate’s heinous acts. I could build a 1986 Caddy out of this year’s junk mail. According to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, this was the most expensive election in American history: more than $11 billion on political ads, more than even the 2024 presidential race. And that number doesn’t count the mailers.
Imagine if all that money went to our communities.
Down in Australia, they do it differently. (Correctly, if you ask me.) Voting’s mandatory and has been since 1924. Skip it, you pay a small fine. Election day always lands on a Saturday, and the polling place is often the neighborhood school. Out front, somebody’s dad is working a grill, offering what Aussies call a “democracy sausage”: a dog on white bread with onions and ketchup, the money going to the PTA. (My Chicago heritage is appalled, but I love it.) Aussies rank their candidates, so a vote for the long shot isn’t a wasted one. An election that feels less like a cage match and more like a block party.
I wish we could look at the American bowl with fresh eyes, and repair rather than replace. The two-party system isn’t built for this century. Congress has no term limits, and we treat politicians like teams we root for no matter what, instead of people who are supposed to do right by us.
We can’t hand our freedoms to the folks at the top who see us as expendable cattle. No more out-of-state landlords and private equity firms buying up our houses, vet clinics and hospitals. Those are cracks worth repairing.
Here’s my stance: I want better schools for our kids. I want healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt the family down the road. I want my taxes to help my neighbors find a good job. No more GoFundMe jars for somebody’s chemo. No more staying in a job you hate because you’re scared to lose the benefits. No more schools that can’t keep teachers because there’s no money to pay them. Those are gold repairs.
So, what’s our democracy sausage? Maybe it’s a fish fry in the church basement on Election Day, the money going to the food pantry. Faith at its best feeds people. That’s Matthew 25, not a party platform.
Gold is everywhere, even in the guy collecting carts at Costco on a hot day. We’re all in this together, cracks and all.
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