The best thing about this election aftermath is the lack of ambiguity. The numbers clearly showed the Republican incumbent edge in a close race. The world looked at our process and must have pronounced it “good” – democracy works! It was excellent for the winners and bitter for the losers. But this is always so.
The win was NOT by a landslide except for that pesky Electoral College. I fear the Republicans will think this is a mandate to continue their deconstruction of democracy as we knew it. I mourn a number of specific things. Life will go on, business will continue to dominate our lives; consume or die.
One: The war will continue, escalate to other areas and will be given legitimacy at least among our own people held hostage by extremists and terrorists.
Two: I mourn the lengthy, costly and nasty race which widened the divide between the complacent and the concerned.
Three: I mourn the cost of at least four billion dollars that would have been used to fix our country’s problems just to give Bush four more years. This may be a long period of mourning for those shut out by winners who care only for themselves and forego repairing the holes and cracks in our democracy.
Four: I mourn that the Senate will remain in Republican hands. This means they will deliver clones of Thomas and Scalia to President Bush, sealing a Conservative Court for many years into the future.
Five: I mourn for jobs lost. I particularly mourn education whose division between schools for most of our children and favored schools will worsen.
Six: I mourn the electoral process that could be made democratic but relies on factors built in by our Constitutional distrust of the individual voter. The compromises made in the 18th Century gave enormous power to small states against the huge populations of the large states. These small states are more equal in this fashion.
Seven: I mourn for stem cell research, for women’s choice and for the rights of non-traditional couples to have the same civil rights as the rest of us. I mourn for a national health program that will be too little and too late.
Eight: I mourn for the continued state of war that exists and the many more lives it will consume. This Republican controlled government cannot fight its way out of the hole it is in without help from the rest of the world.
I mourn for the poor, the racially suppressed who are helpless to help themselves while those adept at taking advantage will strip away more of the protections we once enjoyed. This period of mourning can be shortened by a reawakening of conscience and abandonment of a desire for Americans to become an imperial country in a sea of combative and hate-filled nations formerly called the “Third World”. The mourning will moderate if we can persuade our detractors at home and abroad to look at how well democracy works at the polling place.