Back To Basics

Take a deep breath, absorb the results.  It happened – can’t change it.  No sense getting worked up about it.  The key question is what to do from here.  In fact that is the only question.  Hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and other forms of panic or worry or anxiety are useless.  What do we do from here?

I will likely be ignored for saying this, but this was not a rational outcome to the election.  It’s not that Dems got control of the legislative branch that is irrational – that is common in mid-terms.  It is how they got there. They got there on the back of nutcases like El-Sayed and Talarico.  But there have been nutcases in Congress before, even some Republican ones.  As disappointing as those results are that is not the heart of the issue.

It is the results out of Maine that make this all seem so irrational.  They threw out one of the most powerful people in the Senate.  They exchanged usefulness and function for uselessness.  That is not rational.  It takes decades to accumulate the kind of capabilities Susan Collins has in the Senate.  Anything she wanted for the people of Maine was a downhill slide.  Now, anything the people of Maine want from the Senate will be a nearly insurmountable uphill climb.  This is the clearest indication I can see in these results that whatever drove people to the polls had very little to do with reason and rationality.  This outcome is the result of passion about things other than governance.

And so, back to the question – what do we do from here?  Democrats have shown their willingness and capability to capitalize on those passions.  Republicans tend to respond to such passion with reason and calls for calm, but this outcome seems to indicate that such is no longer, in this internet-driven age, effective.  The world is simply too full of passion-inflaming noise for reason to break through.  Another typical Republican response is to play the long game.  The notion is that things will spin far enough out-of-hand that a natural correction will occur.  But that also implies rationality, and as we seem to be seeing – rationality may no longer be in play.

My initial thoughts, with just a few hours in, will be predictable to regular readers.  We need to get back to basics – faith and education.  There will be much unhappiness in the interim, but we need to focus on making people that can push through the noise and control their passions.

Parents, control your children’s media intake.  Media these days is designed to appeal to our baser instincts, not our reason.  Run for School Board.  Volunteer at the local school.  Teach Sunday School.  Evangelize and support programs that do.  Pay more attention to what is in your face than what is happening in City Hall and the Statehouse.  Bring rationality to your world.

One final word.  Donald Trump is a bet big, win big, and lose big kind of guy.  Two years ago he mounted the greatest political comeback in history – a feat previously unthinkable.  It should be unsurprising that such a personality would also suffer such a stunning loss. Food for thought the next time we cast ballots.