An overdue note on family, politics, the campaign trail, and why I’m still betting on Oregon and America.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s an installment from Tillamook County’s State Representative Cyrus Javadi’s Substack blog, “A Point of Personal Privilege” Oregon legislator and local dentist. Representing District 32, a focus on practical policies and community well-being. This space offers insights on state issues, reflections on leadership, and stories from the Oregon coast, fostering thoughtful dialogue. Posted on Substack, 10/8/26.
By State Representative Cyrus Javadi
Hello, dear reader!
I’m still here.
I realize this may come as a surprise to those of you who have noticed that my weekly newsletter has become something closer to a monthly newsletter. Four weeks without an article. In political terms, that’s approximately three scandals, six news cycles, and a lifetime.
I assure you, there’s no great mystery behind my disappearance. Though I do love a good mystery.
The explanation is considerably less interesting.
It’s campaign season.
And campaign season is that wonderful time of year when every hour of your day is carefully planned, right up until the moment you wake up and the plan becomes entirely irrelevant.
But I’ve missed writing to you. So I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, and something I’ve been thinking about as we approach another election.
Because somewhere between the dental office, the campaign trail, and helping a child understand cellular biology, I’ve found a few reasons to feel rather hopeful about America, and, of course, Oregon.
Yes, really.
A Brief Confession About Writing
Most Sundays, after finishing the previous week’s article, I begin thinking about the next one. I’ll jot down a few ideas in my notebook, let them simmer for a day or two, and eventually attempt to turn them into something resembling a coherent argument.
Sometimes this works beautifully.
Other times I spend four hours reading about the Constitutional Convention, the origins of the Federalist Papers, or some obscure historical dispute, only to discover that I’ve learned a great deal and written precisely nothing.
This probably won’t surprise anyone, but I’m not a professional writer.
I studied accounting and then dentistry, two professions in which brevity is generally considered a virtue. Particularly dentistry. Patients rarely appreciate a lengthy philosophical discussion while you’re holding a handpiece.
Nevertheless, I enjoy writing.
It gives me an opportunity to sort through the constant stream of information coming from newspapers, committee hearings, social media, emails, and conversations with constituents.
More importantly, it forces me to slow down and think.
Something that is becoming a rather endangered activity in American politics.
But writing takes time. Not necessarily hours at a stretch, but days of stopping, starting, reconsidering, and occasionally concluding that the entire argument was better before I started improving it.
And lately, uninterrupted time has been about as common as a bipartisan standing ovation in Congress.
Nine Kids, One Calendar, and a Hurricane
As many of you know, my wife and I have nine children.
Seven have left the house, although apparently no one explained to them that moving out was supposed to reduce the number of daily phone calls.
We are thankful for every call.
Yesterday, our oldest wanted advice about whether to attend a friend’s wedding in Florida, which may soon have a rather unwelcome guest named Hurricane Isaias.
Another child is recovering from surgery. Another is preparing to move to California for her first job. Two are sorting out college financial aid, which is apparently a process designed to make the federal tax code seem intuitive.
One keeps me informed about Eastern philosophy and the latest ideas from her political science classes. Another recently needed a few hours of help understanding cellular biology and the immune system.
Dental school was twenty years ago, but I still recognized some of the vocabulary.
Between those conversations, there are patients to see, a dental practice to run, a wife I’d very much like to spend time with, and a campaign calendar that seems to reproduce when no one is watching.
And somewhere in there, I keep thinking about the next newsletter.
Which brings me to where I’ve actually been.
Ten Thousand Doors and Counting
Over the past several months, our campaign team has knocked on nearly 10,000 doors across the North Coast.
Republicans. Democrats. Independents. And a considerable number of people who would like you to know, usually within the first fifteen seconds, that they belong to absolutely no political party.
Fair enough.
I’ve participated in dozens of town halls, met with hundreds of residents, and attended candidate forums, with more still to come.
Over the past year, I’ve put more than 30,000 miles on the road.
I’ve visited ports, small businesses, restored estuaries, construction projects, housing developments, and hospitals in Astoria, Seaside, and Tillamook.
I’ve sat in living rooms, stood on back porches, and talked with people in coffee shops and businesses. Sometimes the audience is a single person. Sometimes it’s a few hundred.
And what have I learned?
Well, for one thing, people are tired.
Not simply tired of politics, although there’s certainly plenty of that.
They’re tired of watching the price of groceries climb. They’re worried about gas prices, utility bills, and whether their next doctor’s visit will leave them with a bill they can’t afford.
They’re worried that a few missed days of work might mean a missed rent payment.
They want their children to have opportunities. They want their parents to receive decent healthcare. They want roads that work, schools that teach, and a government that can occasionally accomplish something without first staging a public argument about whose fault everything is.
These aren’t especially ideological demands.
They’re the ordinary hopes of people trying to build decent lives.
And here’s what strikes me most.
For all their frustration, people haven’t stopped caring.
They still open their doors. They still come to meetings. They still ask difficult questions. They still offer ideas.
Sometimes they disagree with me rather enthusiastically.
That’s fine, too.
In fact, it’s part of the point.
What Would the Founders Think?
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the American experiment.
The phrase sounds almost quaint now, like something you’d find in an eighth-grade civics textbook between the sections on checks and balances and the Louisiana Purchase.
But it describes one of the most extraordinary wagers in human history.
Could ordinary people govern themselves?
Could a nation survive disagreements over religion, economics, geography, culture, and the proper role of government without eventually surrendering power to someone who promised to make all the arguing stop?
The founders weren’t naïve.
They understood ambition. They understood faction. They understood that people could be selfish, dishonest, and occasionally spectacularly foolish.
James Madison devoted a fair amount of his intellectual energy to the problem.
And having spent a few years in the Oregon Legislature, I can assure you that human nature has not undergone any dramatic upgrades since 1787.
I sometimes wonder what the founders would think if they could see us today.
I suspect they’d be astonished by how much we’ve accomplished.
We abolished slavery. We extended the vote to women and to Americans who had long been denied it because of their race. We expanded civil rights and continued the imperfect work of bringing our institutions closer to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
We built a nation that has endured for 250 years.
Not without failure. Not without injustice. And certainly not without conflict.
But we kept going.
I suspect they’d also have some serious concerns.
They might wonder why Congress so often appears willing to surrender its own responsibilities to the executive branch.
They might be alarmed by efforts to intimidate political opponents, by the treatment of immigrants without adequate regard for due process, and by attempts to undermine public confidence in elections.
And I imagine they’d be particularly puzzled by our habit of treating political parties as if they were hereditary tribes, complete with sacred doctrines and elaborate punishments for heresy.
But I don’t think their greatest concern would be whether Americans still disagreed.
Disagreement was built into the experiment.
I think they’d want to know something else.
Do Americans still believe enough in self-government to take responsibility for it?
Or have we grown so frustrated, so exhausted, and so cynical that we’ve decided the whole thing is someone else’s problem?
The Ground Is Starting to Shake
Here’s why I’m hopeful.
Everywhere I go, I meet people who haven’t given up.
They may be angry. They may be worried. They may have lost faith in a particular politician or political party.
But they haven’t lost faith in the possibility of making things better.
They volunteer. They organize. They attend meetings. They challenge their elected officials. They knock on doors.
They are doing the occasionally frustrating, frequently inconvenient, and absolutely necessary work of citizenship.
And that matters.
Because the American experiment was never supposed to run on autopilot.
It requires people willing to think for themselves, to question authority, to listen to those with whom they disagree, and to place something larger than their own political tribe ahead of the next election.
A year ago, I spoke in Astoria about the responsibility every generation inherits to preserve self-government.
I believe that responsibility is every bit as important today.
And perhaps there’s something stirring across the country.
The ground is starting to shake.
Not an earthquake, for once. Those of us on the coast have enough to worry about.
It’s the sound of millions of Americans deciding that frustration isn’t enough. That complaining isn’t enough. That if they want a different kind of politics, they’re going to have to participate in creating it.
And that’s a sound worth listening to.
The Job Is Bigger Than the Jersey
Of course, all of this brings us to the election.
Ballots begin going out next week. The deadline to register is October 13. And on November 3, voters will make another set of decisions about the direction of their communities, their state, and their country.
I hope those decisions will be about more than party labels.
I’ve said before that I didn’t enter public service to become a professional member of a political party.
I entered because I believed I could help solve problems.
Over the years, that has sometimes meant disagreeing with Republicans. Sometimes it has meant disagreeing with Democrats.
And occasionally it has meant discovering that the people most certain of their own righteousness are the least interested in hearing anything that might complicate it.
I didn’t change political parties because I suddenly acquired an entirely new set of principles.
I changed because I wasn’t willing to surrender my judgment to a party label.
I believe government should be accountable, individual liberty should be protected, taxpayer dollars should be spent responsibly, and elected officials should be willing to work with anyone who has a good idea.
That’s what I believed before.
It’s what I believe now.
And when it comes to issues like keeping rural hospitals open, protecting access to healthcare, lowering costs, improving roads, and making sure families have a fair opportunity to succeed, I’m far more interested in whether a policy works than in which party gets to claim credit for it.
The political jersey is considerably less important than the job.
I know. A scandalous proposition.
The Next Chapter Is Ours
In 1777, while the American Revolution was still being fought, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail about the tremendous cost of preserving liberty.
“Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you make good Use of it!”
Think about that for a moment.
Here was a man risking his reputation, his livelihood, and possibly his neck to establish a nation he might never live to see succeed. And what worried him? Not simply whether the revolution would succeed, but whether future generations would appreciate what had been purchased for them.
There is something almost heartbreaking about that.
Adams understood that his generation could win the war, establish a republic, and write all the constitutions they pleased. But they could not guarantee that their children, or their children’s children, would have the wisdom or the character to preserve it.
They could give us liberty. They could not make us worthy of it.
And I wonder what Adams would think of us today.
We have inherited freedoms that much of humanity, for much of history, could scarcely have imagined. The right to speak, worship, organize, dissent, and choose our own leaders.
Yet we sometimes treat those freedoms as if they were permanent fixtures of the natural world, like gravity or the tides. Something that will simply continue whether we pay attention or not.
But liberty isn’t gravity. It doesn’t sustain itself.
Every generation must decide whether the inheritance is worth the responsibility. Whether we care enough to defend the rights of people we disagree with. Whether we possess the humility to accept that our political opponents are entitled to the same freedoms we demand for ourselves.
Whether we are willing to do the unglamorous work of maintaining a republic rather than simply enjoying the privileges of living in one.
Adams feared that posterity might squander what his generation had sacrificed to create.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re the posterity he was talking about.
And the question is no longer what they were willing to sacrifice for us.
It’s what we’re willing to do for those who come after us.
I think about that when I’m out walking neighborhoods, talking with voters, or listening to my children describe the world they’re preparing to inherit.
What kind of country are we leaving them?
Will we leave them a society in which disagreements can still be resolved peacefully? Where the law applies to the powerful as well as the powerless? Where truth matters? Where people can disagree without becoming enemies?
Will we leave them institutions capable of solving problems?
Or will we leave them a collection of grievances and tell them to figure it out?
Those questions are bigger than any one campaign.
They’re bigger than Oregon.
They’re bigger than the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.
And the answers won’t come from Washington D.C. or from Salem.
They’ll come from all of us.
From people who are willing to show up, to listen, to serve, to vote, and occasionally to admit they might be wrong.
From people who understand that loving your country doesn’t require believing it is perfect.
It requires believing it is worth improving.
And that’s what gives me hope.
Because for all the noise, all the anger, and all the things that seem to be going wrong, I keep encountering people who haven’t given up on one another.
I see it in the volunteers who give up their weekends to help their neighbors. In the small business owners who somehow find the time to serve their communities. In the teachers who stay late for a struggling student. In the families who quietly help someone who has fallen on hard times.
And yes, I see it in the people who open their doors to a politician, even when they’d probably rather be doing just about anything else.
There is still an extraordinary amount of goodness in this country.
And I still believe in the American experiment.
Not because I trust every politician.
Heaven knows that would be a questionable investment.
But because I trust that enough ordinary Americans still care about what happens next.
The founders gave us the beginning of a remarkable story.
They didn’t promise us a happy ending.
That’s the part we have to write ourselves.
And if the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that there are still plenty of Americans willing to pick up the pen.
So, dear reader, that’s where I’ve been.
Between the dental office, the campaign trail, nine children, 30,000 miles of driving, and a black notebook full of half-finished thoughts, I’ve been reminded why I got involved in public service in the first place.
Not because I thought government could solve every problem.
And certainly not because I thought politics would be easy.
But because I believed that, working together, ordinary people could do extraordinary things.
I still do.
Thanks for reading. I’ll try not to disappear for another four weeks.
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If you believe America is still worth believing in, that our differences don’t have to become our divisions, and that politics ought to be about something more than winning the next argument, I hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter.
I write about history, politics, the people I meet, and the ideas that shape our future. Sometimes I’ll challenge what you believe. Sometimes I’ll challenge what I believe. And occasionally, I hope we’ll both come away seeing something a little differently.
Because the American experiment doesn’t belong to politicians. It belongs to all of us. And the more thoughtful, curious, and independent-minded people we bring into the conversation, the better its chances of succeeding.
So subscribe. It’s free. Share it with someone who sees the world differently than you do. And let’s see if we can’t make this little corner of the internet a place where people come to think, rather than just to agree.
Heaven knows we have enough of those already.
Whatever your political affiliation, I appreciate your taking the time to read, ask questions, and participate in the conversation about our community’s future.
Please remember to vote on November 3.
