Afterwords: Is national unity possible?

2004-11-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

04 November 2004

The United States was once more carved up into red states and blue states in the 2004 election. This time out, the reds won the contest (more or less fairly and honestly this time, or so it seems). But this last election cycle hit a new low in its absolute lack of civility, its refusal to elaborate on each of the candidate's respective sound bites, and the almost pathological need of each of the two major campaigns to attack some aspect of the opponent's personal life. All in all, the entire contest almost (but not quite) made me want to give up voting entirely. But, like most people (I suppose), I managed to keep my cookies down long enough to actually go to the polls and cast my vote.

Now that the show is over, a question occurs to me: are the reds, flush with their recent victory and their dominance over two of the three branches of government (and, perhaps soon, over the Supreme Court as well, if any of the Justices there retire or otherwise leave the Court), going to try and govern the nation as a whole, or will they continue the frenzy of personal attacks on anyone who doesn't agree with their political views?

On the one hand, the President has made a show of expressing the need for reconciliation and unity in order to move the nation forward. Although I am not yet certain whether his words are backed by even a hint of sincerity, I have to admit that it sounds nice.

On the other hand, I have found the "talk radio" hosts and their callers to be decidedly hostile to the idea of even sharing the same planet with their political opposites. Gloating over the "highest number of votes ever cast for any presidential candidate" (even though their candidate only got a few million more votes than Senator Kerry, which is a fairly ordinary result in American national elections) and how this means the voters have given them a "mandate," the hosts and listeners of these programs seem determined to obliterate all traces of the dread disease of "liberalism" (now I've done it, I've used the dreaded "L" word) from as much of the planet as they can get their hands on. I seem to recall from my history classes that German supporters of the National Socialists in their 1932 election felt much the same way.

Now, to put the red victory in perhaps it's true perspective, there was a report on the Nov. 4, 2004 broadcast of ABC's evening news program that one of the newly-elected members of Congress was calling for the death penalty to be imposed on any doctor who had performed an abortion (even though abortions are legal, at least for now). This sort of a comment from an elected official is hardly, in my humble opinion, going to inspire the people who did not vote for the President to want to "fall in line and follow the President" (a quote from one or the other of those ridiculous "talk radio" shows; their hate-filled blather sounds pretty much the same to me).

Hmmm...is that the sound of jackbooted stormtroopers I hear?

Decision 2008

Afterwords: Is national unity possible?