There is an hour in St. Petersburg, right after the heat breaks, when the whole city comes back outside. People walk the brick streets. Neighbors hand things over fences. Somebody’s speaker is playing something old and good. Down on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street a man lifts two fingers off the steering wheel and waves at no one in particular, which is his way of waving at everyone.

That is the city I know. That is the city I have given so much of my life to, in its neighborhoods and its housing, in its pulpits and its living rooms and its long meetings in cold rooms.

I do not recognize that city in this mayoral race.

What we are watching is not ours. It is borrowed. The barrage of attacks, the manufactured outrage, the daily search for a rival’s worst day and the eagerness to hold it up to the light. This is the national playbook, imported wholesale and run on a city that never asked for it. It shows up in our mailboxes and our feeds wearing local colors, but the script was written somewhere else, by people who do not know the name of your street.

St. Petersburg deserves an argument. What it does not deserve is a performance.

To the candidates:

Mudslinging is not our normative practice here. It is not who we are. And whatever ground it wins you between now and August, it will cost this city something that is still going to be missing on the morning after somebody takes the oath.

Taking shots is cheap. It requires nothing but nerve. Litigating the grievances of the current administration, and the one before it, and the one before that, requires no imagination at all. Anyone can do it. Most people running for something eventually do.

What costs more is vision. What takes actual toughness is standing in front of a room of tired and skeptical people and telling them, in specific terms, where this city will be in four years if they hand it to you. Not what is broken. Where we are going. What our shorelines look like. What a family making forty thousand dollars a year can afford to live in. Who is at the table when the money moves. What we will have built that outlasts your name on it.

We have forgotten what a gift this is. Six people want the same job. Each of you carries a different picture of the future. You are laying those pictures side by side so that the people who actually live here can choose among them. That is not a nuisance to be survived. That is the whole beautiful mechanism. People have died so that this city could have it.

And you should know that we can see. The electorate is not as easily managed as your consultants believe. We can tell the genuine from the manufactured. We can tell when a room is being played. We can tell when something untrue has been said, and we watch closely in the 90 seconds after, to see whether you own it or double down. That moment tells us more about how you will govern than any policy paper you will ever release.

We want leaders who are honest. Honest about their faults. Honest in their vision. Honest about their mistakes, said out loud, without a lawyer’s hedging. Honest about what St. Petersburg actually needs, which is not always the same thing as what a candidate wants to accomplish before the next race.

To my brothers and sisters of the citizenry:

The candidates are only half of this. We are the other half, and we have far more power than we behave like we have.

Let us demand more from the people who want this job.

Let us not hand our vote to whoever lands the best hit. A sharp attack is a skill. It is not a qualification. Nobody ever fixed a lift station with a good line.

Let us not hand our vote to the person who says the right thing about the most acute issue of the week without the stanzas to tell us how and why. Ask the second question. Ask the third. Ask what a decision looks like in 10 years, in 20, in the life of a grandchild who has not been born yet. Someone who cannot trace their own thinking down the road has not really done the thinking.

Let us not hand our vote to whoever has the most money and therefore the most signs, the most airtime, the most frequent appearance in our feeds. Volume is not merit. Volume is only volume.

And let us not hand our vote to the lesser of any evils. That framing is a trap and we have been walking into it for years. It asks us to grade the future on a curve we did not set.

Let us give our votes instead to the betterment of this city. To what we actually deserve. To where we have said we want to go.

Let our faith carry us there. Faith in the process, ragged as it is. Faith in this city, which has survived a great deal worse than a rough campaign season. And for those of us who pray, faith in a God who has never once been impressed by the loudest voice in the room, and who asks something of us as plain as this: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

One more thing worth saying. August will come and go, and then November, and then one of these six will be sworn in and the other five will still live here. So will we. We will be at the same intersections, the same schools, the same Publix. Campaigns end. Neighbors do not.

So let us conduct ourselves like people who intend to stay.

The heat will break again this evening and the city will come back outside. Somebody will lift two fingers off the wheel and wave at no one in particular. I want whoever wins this thing to be worthy of that wave.

We can be better than this race has been. We have been before.

Let us be St. Petians about it.

Meiko Seymour is a local pastor, blogger and podcaster.