FINGER POINTING AND FIRINGS
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
What changed?
Too close to call?
What happened last night?
Our American friends established that pollsters aren’t reliable. Their country and its states are not united philosophically – still divided along similar lines as four years ago, and I went to bed quite late with the result still in question.
I’ll likely wake up to learn the results are not yet clear …
It matters to Americans, but the result matters to Canadians too, and many other countries reliant upon doing business with the most powerful country in the world; as an ally certainly, but we are impacted by who is in charge, by which party controls the houses of congress, and we news/politics junkies like me want to know.
Do we know the results yet, will we know them soon, will the ensuing controversies be on the front page for days or weeks, or will they find their way to lining the floor of some bird’s cage?
Elections that aren’t close usually end in finger-pointing and firings. Elections that aren’t close are followed by court applications and lawyers’ bills, which in turn are followed by finger-pointing and firings.
Everyone wants to get back to work in a post-election and post-pandemic world. That’s coming … and for most people, not soon enough.
A lot of things happened, and most of them didn’t make the cable news shows.
Everywhere on earth, there was a day of births, deaths, celebrations, announcements, disasters, weather, breakthroughs, announcements, inventions, and mistakes. Not enough peace, not enough cease-fires, not enough empty ICU beds, and no vaccine yet. My point is that we can fret about our troubles du jour, and I do not mean to diminish concerns about the pandemic, but we need to look at more and look for more in all of us.
Today, tomorrow, and the next day, all the same things – except for that U.S. election.
There’s an old song – from the Poseidon Adventure, which won the academy award for best song, by Maureen McGovern called The Morning After – great music and an important point, that when a tumultuous or disastrous even occurs (in that movie it was a tidal wave upending a cruise ship, recently we’ve had a pandemic swamp our tranquility, and economic/political upheaval is turning every institution and previous assumptions on their ear), people carry on notwithstanding what happened last night. It’s not about finger-pointing or blame or regret. It’s about carrying on.
People get up and go to work. Newspapers run their presses, talking-heads talk, and fish still swim in the sea, bears poop in the forest, and earth continues its orbit around the sun.
Windmills still tilt, voices still need to be heard – but for today, let’s take a breather and fight again tomorrow.
What can we change?
Let’s get to work on those things.
Meanwhile, we’ve had a lesson in democracy, covered live on every TV network where, at the end of the night, the real answer was, tune in tomorrow …
And maybe we could replace the finger-pointing with finger-painting.
Reader feedback:
You are so right. To paraphrase “ It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. ”. LH, Lethbridge, AB
Death is a side effect of living...is my daily purpose to experience life safely :), AG, Cancun, Mex.
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