The air is filled with talk of morality and values today, when I was a political reporter, the campaign patter was different, quieter, more practical.  Politicians were all about promises, most of which we all knew could never be kept. Nobody talked much about morality.

They lied all the time, but the lies were hopeful, rarely cruel or apocalyptic. Everyone seemed to feel they were in the same boat. Today, we are all sailing in our own boats.

For many people, today’s election is about our moral choices, or values, our ideas about who we want to be. Jung wrote that the challenge of the middle-life crisis is about understanding what moral choices we have to make or get to make, and which ones we don’t get to make.

We all think of ourselves as moral beings, the Trump supporters every bit as much as me, perhaps more.

If you watch the news, each side is forever scrambling to plant their flag on the high ground, somehow we have all – all of us – ended up talking only to ourselves.

But the problem is when you only talk to yourself, you never learn to grow, listen or change. That’s when the trouble starts.

We each live in our own myths, we live in the moral life we are supposed to be committed. We tend more and more to see people whose moral myths are different as dangerous, as enemies.

Empathy is one of the saddest casualties in our new divided world, it is no longer considered  Christian or generous to stand in the shoes of the other, we are learning to hate the others because they are different. Christian theologists set the tone for the moral world for centuries, today, they mostly seem to be just another political cult.

Journalists stood back and provided perspective, now they shout even louder than the politicians. The past is no better than the present, just different. We learn to live with it or perish.

I seek to speak and think respectfully of people who disagree with me, I hope they will extend me the same courtesy. Judging from me messages on-line, we aren’t there yet.

I like to think of myself as a moral being, especially lately, but I can’t find myself or see myself anywhere on the news except in young  Beto O’Rourke, the only political candidate in the country I sent money to regularly.  It was $25 ever couple of months.

I have no wish to argue this position or that, I just like him. There is something earnest and true about him.

I admit I also favor him for being young. It is so refreshing to see somebody in public life  who is not just an embittered and aging old white man.

The future does not belong to me, it belongs to the young, and if I believe what I see and hear, it will soon belong to women to a much greater degree.

Those are all good things to me, I am an older white male eager and willing to get out-of-the-way, we have made quite a mess out of this world. I am nothing if not a dinosaur, stomping through the ages.

I have a lot of life to live ,but I know my time is over.

I have the sense that Beto is  trying to find his moral ground and is trying to stick to it.

I think he is sincere, right or wrong, and that touches me in a personal way. He doesn’t have the mean or nasty gene that is spreading through the political culture. When he speaks it is of hope and  compassion.

I hope he wins, and if he doesn’t, I hope he runs for other things soon. I would be happy to lick envelopes for him.

This does not make me any more moral than anyone else. I realize that we put our morals on and take them off according to our needs at the moment, and our own sense of what is appropriate or proprietary.

My world will not end today if votes don’t go my way. I have worked hard for my good life, and I expect I will have it to live in the morning, no matter what Fox News or CNN thinks. I will just do more and more good. So bad news becomes good news.

It all got easier for me once I came to understand I do not have a lock on wisdom. I let go of telling other people what to do or think, there is no place for me on the left or the right.

I never see my own morality as cosmic truth. The laws and politics of society are social conventions, not the eternal laws of God. The individual makes his own judgments as to how he acts. We are all different.

The Trump supporter looks in the mirror just as I do and likes what he sees. He is no different from me except I sense he or she is angrier than I am, and feels more aggrieved.

He may be right. I have always been able to work and live in intact communities, I could always afford health care, I never had to see a child of mine die from a drug overdose or commit suicide from hopelessness. I never had to watch my father drink himself into the ground because he couldn’t find work his whole adult life. I never had a small business or factory wiped off the earth by China or Mexico.

I am puzzled at our hatred for the other side.

As a reporter, I loved getting to see and experience what was on the other side. That was never fake to me, it was quite real. If I have any wisdom at all, it was because of what I learned from others, not what I heard from people just like me.

I think Beto knows this, he went to the other side hundreds of times, and always listened. I have no doubt he learned things, and didn’t just parrot polls.

Joseph Campbell says we must all learn to live by our own myths, our own sense of what is moral and what is not.

My wish on Election Day is that we can learn to do that again.