"I've Done My Bit..."

My Facebook feed is saturated with people declaring that they have indeed voted today. Some of them have nailed their colours to the mast, put banners on their profile pictures and proudly taken selfies having worn their appropriately coloured rosettes and t-shirts to the polling station.

"I've done my bit..." declares friend after friend... But I'm left to wonder, have they really?

Sure, today they have made a decision and made a mark. Or some will have made several marks to communicate their discontent with all of the proposed candidates. Others have fulfilled the words of Rush by staying away: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

But is that really us "doing our bit"?

You see while we did what we could today to discern the best candidate and policies to vote for that see themselves and our nation benefitting, tomorrow morning is when we need to "do our bit".

There are going to be millions of disappointed people tomorrow morning:
Those who have worked hard campaigning and fighting for what they believe in, longing to share a vision, only to see the vision not caught;
Those who dared to believe that the vote they cast might sway the balance one way or the other for the benefit of our nation only to discover that they were outvoted by a handful or a landslide;
Those people who chose not to decide and committed themselves to the hands of everyone else moving forwards.

I've been aware of it for the last few years in a politically charged Glasgow that has had the opportunity to vote time and again for representatives at various and in multiple referendums for futures, and the closer the vote, the greater the disappointment.

What really matters is what we do with that disappointment, or how well we use our success.

All those things you voted for, the principles of the local candidate and the party manifesto, do you believe in them? Are you willing to see them actioned? Because if you are, does it really matter which party got the majority? Why should that stop you taking action?

"Doing our bit" is about more than just putting an "X" in a box, even on a day when it rains. "Doing our bit" is about living out the bits of those manifestos that really motivated us to dare to believe.

It's about drawing from all those manifestos to fight for what is important to us, acknowledging that the Greens have something valid to say, that Labour might have made some good points, that the Conservatives aren't as misguided as people might have made out, that the Lib Dem's really do have vision in certain areas...

Imagine the difference we could make if we saw those things happening in our communities, if we saw people from all sides fighting for a better Nation.

So instead of wallowing tomorrow because the party we voted for is on the wrong side of the box, how about we roll our sleeves up and get working towards a properly "Strong and Stable" nation?
Or instead of losing friends as we wildly celebrate that our "favourite" has a new house, how about we work towards a society that exists "For the Many - Not the Few"?
Should we end up with a coalition, with apparent confusion and potential chaos, let's be optimistic about "creating a confident and caring Britain," or even genuinely being "Stronger for Scotland"! 

But hey, maybe I'm more of an optimist than I let on...