Facing a Dilemma? Ask Yourself This Question

Imagining future conversations with your loved ones provides a startling amount of clarity

Photo by Burst on Unsplash

In the January/February 2022 issue of The Atlantic, Tim Alberta profiles Peter Meijer, a freshman congressman from Michigan and one of only ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year after the January 6th insurrection. The article describes how Meijer consulted several other congresspeople whom he considered “like-minded” in advance of the impeachment vote. During Meijer’s conversation with Congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Gonzalez reportedly went from indecision to absolute certainty that Trump must be impeached. His reasoning was as follows: “I can convince myself not to vote for impeachment. But if my son asks me in 20 years why I didn’t vote for impeachment, I couldn’t convince him.”

Similarly, in Senator Mitt Romney’s speech explaining his first vote to convict Trump, in February 2020, he described the importance of having a clear conscience before his family as a major motivation for his marked dissent from the Republican party: “My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability believing that my country expected it of me.”