Every morning I open the newspaper, read the news from Washington, and feel sick. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way: angry, horrified, and impotent. It’s not just a matter of disagreeing with what is happening. It’s a sense that our national government is morally and operationally broken in a way that we have never seen before.

Congress has shown itself to be incapable of doing its job. It can’t pass laws to solve the most basic problems, even when the legislation would have broad public support.

And the most powerful people in government, from the president on down, now openly flaunt their disregard for basic rules of conduct — rules of conduct that were so taken for granted in a functioning democracy that we didn’t even think they needed to be stated.

Repairing a broken government is going to be a long, slow, laborious process.

I thought of all this recently (I think about it all the time, actually) while I considered refinishing an old table. To strip the cruddy old paint off, I would have to start with coarse-grit sandpaper, to get down to the basic bare wood. Only then could I shift to fine-grit sandpaper, to polish, to refine, to attend to the details.

In any area of public debate, things can get complicated and heated very quickly — heated because people are looking for politicians who agree with them on every single issue. But we are in a time of crisis, and before we reach for the fine sandpaper we need to grab the coarse-grit sandpaper — to find a few rough-and-ready principles that a broad majority of people can unite on.

“What can we do?’’ we have been asking. “Run for office,’’ we are told. And a lot of good people are now running for office. But what can the rest of us do?

Vote.

And let the people who are running for office know what it will take to earn our votes.

Basic integrity. Basic common sense. Basic commitment to public service.

I’m not an expert. But this is my attempt at a coarse-grit sandpaper list — a list of core political principles and actions that I think a lot of people across the United States could get behind these days. It doesn’t include every issue that I care about. And it leaves plenty of room for sane, ethical people to disagree on many issues, which is the essence of a fair and free democracy. It’s an emergency list. It’s short and it’s simple.

1. Ban assault weapons.

2. Support clean, renewable energy sources.

3. Guarantee affordable health care for all.

4. Refrain from actual and apparent conflicts of interest — nepotism, personal profit.

5. Support full independent investigations of any outside or internal threat to our election process.

To start to fix our broken government, to demonstrate that our public servants can effectively address some basic problems, and to begin to restore trust in our shaken public process, this is what we can demand. And this is the commitment we can ask of any candidate — state or national — who wants our votes in 2018 and beyond.

Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe.