America has finally made it to Election Day. Either tonight or soon afterward, we will know if President Trump gets a second term or if Joe Biden succeeds him.
Whatever happens, there are bound to be hurt feelings on the losing side. Democrats will believe Trump somehow stole the election. Republicans will believe the end of capitalism is near.
It may help the few optimistic souls among us to consider the excellent insights of Hugh Hewitt, a columnist for The Washington Post.
His Oct. 30 column analyzes a new book about the Founding Fathers, “First Principles,” by Thomas E. Ricks. But the column headline, “We will survive this, too, no matter who wins,” very much applies this to the country’s divisions that are evident this election year.
Here are a few quotes from Hewitt’s column to remind us all that, as bad as things seem today, America has been through much worse:
The Founding Fathers “knew the cycle of recorded human history: crisis, revolution, counterrevolution, restoration, reform, stability — and then crisis. They reached for enduring stability. They achieved it — but at the great moral cost of accepting slavery.
“Visit Monticello, as I did this month, and see how the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has presented the genius along with the blindness, the soaring visions and the awful, hypocritical realities of the man, and of his Virginia neighbors James Madison and James Monroe.”
“We have arrived here, at a tense moment, by paths far more treacherous than this devastating pandemic and with far worse than even our superheated political rhetoric. Ricks reminds us that the original patriots, deeply flawed as they were, worked with what they had, compromised when they were obliged to, accepted defeats and moved on, celebrated victories but with an understanding that they were transient.”
We are not on the brink of civil war. We aren’t near the levels of violence that marked 1966-1968. It is not a revolutionary moment, though we are in the midst of the Trump counterrevolution to the “Obama revolution,” which followed the crisis years that began on 9/11 and climaxed in the 2008 financial collapse. Next year or in four or eight years, a restoration will happen. Then there will be reforms and stability.”
“And then another crisis, or series of crises. It is not our first pandemic or our last. There will be booms and busts and, inevitably, more wars.”
We are in a crisis because of the virus, indeed the whole world is, but it is one from which we will emerge, though with terrible loss and suffering. And we will survive this election, no matter who wins.
“We are a free people, and we will remain that next year, in 10 years and 100 more after that if we just trust the guide that nature and nature’s God gave us.”
Hewitt’s point: No matter what happens Tuesday, Americans of all persuasions should have faith in the future of the country. Amen!
