Winning

By the time this is published the election will be over. I pray this election is sufficiently lopsided that there aren’t any arguments about who won. History does give me some hope. We’ve had incredibly nasty elections in the past, worse in ways than this one was. Sometimes we haven’t elected the best candidate, and yet we survive. Democracy is messy but it is superior to all other forms of government. There may be violence, but I hope not. Violence is never a rational answer to conflicts. Some folks don’t like it, but the heart and soul of a democracy is compromise. When adults of reasonable intelligence and good will sit down to figure out the best way to deal with problems we all win.

In much of life, winning does not have to be zero-sum, where if one person wins the other, by definition, loses. In much of life, if we work at it, we can have win-win scenarios where maybe no one gets everything they want but everybody gets something. Our electoral system doesn’t have that as a possibility in the elections but afterwards it is certainly possible.

Many of our problems are systemic and can’t be fixed with simplistic measures. Our ongoing problems, like immigration, like energy production, like climate change, defy simple answers and invariably persist regardless of which party holds power. Most problems require Congressional solutions. Therefore, we should all insist our elected Representatives and Senators abandon ideological stances and work across the aisle to find solutions instead of the scalps of so-called enemies.

So, hopefully, we’re done with the nastiness we’ve just been through.

In other winning news, my Dodgers won the World Series. I’ve shared before that I’ve been a Dodger fan for 70 years, starting when they were still in Brooklyn. Yes, I’m well aware that being a fan of a professional sports’ franchise is rather irrational. The players change year after year, ownership changes at times. Sometimes teams move from one city to another. Sports do give us an outlet for our partisan, tribal fanaticism. We can, quite reasonably, absolutely “hate” other teams and cheer for anyone playing against, for example, the Astros in baseball or the Raiders in football. That’s a kind of harmless emotional release that doesn’t hurt except in those rare occasions when some over the top idiot decides resorting to violence is a logical extension of loving his or her team. I once got in a discussion with a man who was attending an Angels game with his young son. He said, with a grin, he hoped somebody in his vicinity would cheer for the other team so he could get in a fight. Later on I saw him being led away by security so, I assume, he got his wish to be a complete idiot in front of his son.

Hopefully, we will all eventually learn that divisiveness and hate don’t serve us well and can begin to care for one another like rational people.