How are you today? It’s been an emotional weekend for all of us. Back in December of 2019, when I laid out the plan for this year’s blogs, I knew this Monday was going to be tough on a lot of us, tough on half of us. I knew I’d be blogging after a tense election, but I sure never imagined the scale of the emotions and the whole sorry mish-mash that was 2020.
So how are you today?
If you are one of my fellow Americans, I feel ya.
We are entering a new phase of the election cycle.
Those of us on the upside of this bare-knuckle fist-fight of an election aren’t off the hook. We don’t get to gloat. We don’t get to wag fingers and act like children. There is one truth that we all know: this government, by design, doesn’t allow any party to have its own way, all the time. So it behooves us to swing the door wide and to make it easy for everyone to shoulder their way back to the table.
Those of us who voted for the candidate that lost are struggling to get our minds around that. I have been on the losing end of many of these. I voted for Ross Pierrot. I voted for a lot of other guys who lost. After an election during which I backed runner up, there’s always that sense that something just went wrong. There’s the sense that we just need to check a few more things, that surely, this isn’t the way it ends.
It’s really hard to swallow. And then… out walks the other guy and all his followers and they’re saying stuff like “put aside your differences, work across the aisle.” They say – “It’s time to come together.”
Ouch. It really stings. It’s like ripping off a band-aid, like not getting the job, like not bringing the project over the finish line on time. You’re not healed yet, you want one more try, but it’s over. It feels unfinished and unrealistic. Maybe you recount all the ballots in Florida. Maybe you recount Michigan. You’re the one still sitting at the table, trying to see if the deck had fifty-two cards in it.
I’ve sat in my chair, arms folded, aggravated and disappointed, and listened to many politicians ask me to put aside my differences.
I didn’t want to.
I still had my own mind. There are 70 million Americans out there who still have their own minds today. The election didn’t change that, and that’s OK.
Come together.
Come together is the thing that we do in America which is as unique and rare as a planet with water, oxygen, and carbon life forms. Come together is the thing that sets us apart.
Come together is America showing the world how it’s done. We don’t take to the streets with guns. We don’t divide our nation into warring factions. We don’t behave like there’s no due process.
It doesn’t mean we’re all singing around a campfire, but it does mean that we respect our system of government and we believe in the dream that is America.
We use the systems handed down to us by our founding fathers – a group of mismatched, imperfect, and fallible individuals. Those imperfect beings managed by some miracle to be greater than the sum of their parts. They created this wacky and brilliant electoral college. They created three branches of government. They ceded the power of elections to the states so that no one group could ever rig an election. They penned the constitution. They? Were magic.
Turns out it wasn’t a one shot deal.
Together, we are always greater than each of us alone.
So this is it.
There’s the election – the bare facts of what happened; the situation we find ourselves in.
And there are your thoughts about the election.
These are not the same thing.
The election happened. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just is.
There are dozens of thoughts you can have about it.
You get to pick some out, find one that helps. When I’m on the dust-kickin’, downtrodden side of the game, I like to think “Well, it’s just four years and they can’t wreck the whole thing in four years.”
That’s the beauty of our country. Because no matter who sits in the people’s house, they can’t wreck the whole thing in four years. It’s never happened. They can’t even wreck it in eight years. It’s a belief that we take on faith. Sometimes, it’s just a prayer.
If we think our democracy is in trouble, we’ll act like it is – and then? Well, it really will be.
If we believe that due process, checks and balances, and the resiliency of the country as a whole will prevail, we’ll act like we have rational options and faith in the future. And then? All those things will continue to be true.
If we believe our opponents are less than us, less honorable, less intelligent, less “right”, then we won’t honor them, and we will be dishonorable, we won’t consult them and we will miss what they have to contribute. We’ll act as if we’re always right, and that’s never right.
If we believe that we can not, should not and must not be divided, then we will create unity.
So this is it.
The situation is – we had a big election.
We get to decide what that means.
And that? Is it.