I woke up three times in the middle of the night Friday with exactly the same thought in mind, and not just a groggy kind of stirring, a sit-up-in-the-bed wake-up with an undefined but compelling point behind it.
So here it is.
This nation is not going to split down the middle and separate along a line that will leave one group awaiting the rapture and the other group awaiting its handcar to hell. It is not in danger of fracturing at all, as a matter of fact. It remains more intact than most places on Earth.
It is time for the people I think of as media wussies (and I can say that because I have been one of them plenty of times) to stop playing Cassandra and walk into the sunlight. A tough election campaign is now over. George W. Bush is president again.
Some of us won and some of us lost.
Well, that’s certainly brand new in the world of politics, isn’t it?
Everything is, most likely, just as fine as it was before the process began. We can all pray this president gets our sons and daughters out of Iraq as soon as he can and avoids any ridiculous charges into any other nations. That would be good. Very good.
But the sense that there was something about Nov. 2 that reflected anything other than your standard political realignment, which has happened many times in American history, is simply wrong. It is indeed a different country because now we have a president who was elected with some clarity, some resolve, in the process.
I recall sitting down at a typewriter post Richard M. Nixon, just after the pardon by President Gerald Ford, to suggest the Republicans would never and should never win an election again.
Fortunately, a friend stopped me just in time.
The flawed Republicans went away to hide for a while, cleansed themselves of many of their demons and then emerged somewhere in the sandy Southwest, with 20-mule team Borax, the Old Ranger and Ronald Reagan firmly in hand.
Wasn’t that a jolly development for a party that had danged near consumed itself?
The Democrats can do the same thing.
It’s now revival time. All they need is a good dessert, some serious sweating out of many issues and personalities, and a conclusion about who their own version of the Gipper might be. Warning. It won’t be someone from Hollywood and, hey, we know now two times (this one and Michael Dukakis) that it won’t be someone from Massachusetts.
The United States hasn’t been damaged at all by the process. I am deeply upset with friends and associates who are denigrating Bush supporters as being rural, religious and somehow dim. I think very hard about the coalitions that joined to elect Franklin Roosevelt so many times and I see exactly the same people–that time on the Democratic side. Life is what qualifies people to vote. The issues, the beliefs, the challenges, the dreams–those are the things that inform political decision.
It is no surprise to me, then, that “morality,” whatever that is, played such a big role in this election. In the first place, the word has no meaning in that context because it’s too vague. Let’s just call it religion, which is not the same thing, and let’s just call it fundamentalism. So?
God can sort all of this out after each of us marches off to our own messy Armageddon, whether it be on the highway some night or through a slip in the bathtub or in a full Cecil B. DeMille End of the World kind of thing. Here’s how I boil it all down.
If you don’t get pregnant–and men don’t, so we really shouldn’t have that much to say about it–you won’t need an abortion.
Case closed.
We should do everything we can to make certain that young people are armed up to the eyes with birth-control stuff, because–if experience and memory still serve–abstinence is an argument you embrace firmly only in the presence of preacher and parent.
I don’t think having sex means you are going to hell.
I cannot imagine, on that final day, God standing in front of me, knowing all of the bad and good things I have done in my life, saying, “Well, you haven’t had sex outside of marriage have you?”
We in journalism make a big mistake when we simplify election results into gigantic graphics where everything is either blue or red. A couple of hundred votes, as history shows, can slide a blue state over into the red column. So what?
What that means is that beneath the surface of each red Republican state, and sometimes not too deeply beneath the surface, there is a blue state. It’s not like those people went away .
They are all still there, just as passionate as they were on election eve, although, no doubt, feeling a little battered at this point.
There will be hell to pay, as they say, if the religious agenda is pushed too strongly into the public arena, first, because it’s the kind of thing that makes its way to the Supreme Court and, conservative or not, the religion/government mix is still a big taboo.
Second, it’s stupid politics. Most people are not Christian fundamentalists. So, preach and thump the holy book all you want, but remember there is a perimeter around each of us, as impermeable as Kevlar, where our own religious thoughts are allowed to play out. No one else belongs in there but you and God.
The last thing that woke me up in the middle of the night is something from earlier in the week, some line of reasoning from an academic on public radio that included a little riff about the conditions necessary for civil war.
Now, first, no one should be stupid enough to talk that way, either on the journalism side or the interviewee side. Two of the most important places on Earth to me these days are the battlefield at Gettysburg and ground zero in lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center buildings used to sit.
Those are two things this nation had to survive, a civil war that could have ended the United States of America, a conflict that had brothers and cousins killing one another, and an attack that cut us to the very heart and stripped away our sense of security.
Compared to those events, this was just an election, an important one, but an election nonetheless. Could we please find a way to stop demonizing the people who won and the people who lost?
They are, after all, in a religious sense, all our brothers and our sisters. In that context, political labels are meaningless and the relationship is redefined in the context of a much bigger power.
