I've got three little kids at home, and I'm trying to save this

In the square where plain speech meets solemn oath, a man declares: “I’ve got three little kids at home, and I’m trying to save this country from itself. I’m not here to play political power games, and I’ve had enough of people playing political power games, and this has just gone on too long.” Hear the homely cadence and the iron inside it. The words yoke private duty to public labor; they set the hearth beside the forum. A parent’s vigilance becomes a citizen’s vow, and the long patience of child-rearing is offered as the measure for governing. The claim is simple, almost rustic: purpose over theater, stewardship over spectacle.

In the old manner of the elders, let us weigh the meaning. To speak of three little kids is to place innocence at the center, to remind the noisy city what is at risk when governance becomes a contest of cunning. To speak of saving this country is to confess love, not conquest; rescue, not rule. To renounce political power games is to reject the glittering mask and choose the work beneath it—listening, deciding, bearing the cost. Such speech is a plough laid across the threshold of office, that all who enter must step over the tool that feeds the people.

This creed has ancient kin. When Rome trembled, the farmer Cincinnatus was called from his furrows to take up the hard charge of emergency rule. He shouldered power like a millstone—only long enough to grind the crisis into bread—and then returned to his field. In him, the republic saw the pattern: accept authority as a burden, refuse it as a bauble, and measure every act by the harvest it brings for the many. Thus the archetype stands against the fever of faction and the stagecraft of ambition.

Across the seas and centuries, the pattern reappears. George Washington—victor, adored, urged toward crowns—walked into the chamber at Annapolis and laid down his sword. With that relinquishment he taught a continent what it means to finish a task without fastening oneself to the throne it could purchase. He made renunciation itself an instrument of nation-building, proving that the republic’s strength is not in clinging hands but in open ones.

In our own age, the line “I’m not here to play political power games” strikes like a bell. It warns that governance can curdle into competition, that debates become duels for applause, and emergencies become stages for personal ascent. The antidote is not fury but fidelity—to children who will inherit the verdicts of today, to neighbors who will eat the bread or bear the famine of our policies, to institutions that outlive any single reputation. To say “this has gone on too long” is to call time on vanity, to end the masquerade and return to the workshop where compromises are shaped and common goods are repaired.

Yet rhetoric alone cannot thresh grain. The elder wisdom binds words to rule: let motive be tested by sacrifice; let plans be judged by the quiet betterment of ordinary lives; let the measure of success be the home, the school, the street that grows safer and more just. The parent’s gaze—tender, exacting, forward-looking—becomes the template for leadership. The cry to save this country is not a trumpet for conquest; it is a carpenter’s mark, checking each beam for straightness before the storm.

Therefore, take this as a teaching to hand down: public duty begins at the cradle and returns to it at day’s end. Let those who would govern remember the weight of small heads sleeping under their roof, and let those who watch the governors refuse to be charmed by power games when bread is needed and bridges must be mended. The republic is a long table; the chairs at it belong, first, to the yet-unborn.

And here are practices for the traveler on this road: (1) Name your stake—write the names of those you serve (your little kids, your block, your crew) at the top of every decision. (2) Trade theater for thresholds—before any public act, ask what private habit it will require of you tomorrow. (3) Choose craft over clash—schedule one hour each week to work with a rival on a narrow, measurable good. (4) Practice renunciation—once a season, lay down some lever of influence you do not need, as Washington did, to keep your hands honest. (5) Keep harvest books—track outcomes that touch real lives, not only headlines. In these small, stubborn obediences, the vow to save this country ceases to be a shout and becomes a shelter.