Save That Happy Dance; There’s Too Much Work Ahead
– By Ed Kociela –
I’m a terrible dancer.
Just ask my wife, and she will tell you I am more adept at stepping on her toes than sweeping her gracefully across the floor.
But, that’s not why I am not joining all of those who have jumped in to do the happy dance on the heels of the election.
I can certainly understand the jubilation that sent people into the streets to celebrate once the bean counters sussed it out that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election.
After the math guys determined that the race was mathematically over, voters were literally dancing in the streets from New York City to Portland; from Los Angeles to Atlanta, and it was shocking. You would have thought you were watching videotape from when Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq, and I was deeply saddened to think that the United States has become a Third World country.
The response was similar in other global communities. It was Guy Fawkes Day in Great Britain, but as fireworks lit the sky over London, an enthusiastic crowd chanted Joe Biden’s name. In Munich and Paris, church bells rang.
Look, I am pleased with the outcome, but now is not the time to break into a pirouette. It would simply be bad form.
We still have people dying from COVID-19.
We have an economy in the toilet.
We have racial unrest.
We are as deeply divided as we were during the Civil War.
And, just on principle, it is as important to be a gracious winner as it is to be a gracious loser. As we can see, there’s not enough grace to go around right now.
I don’t envy either Donald Trump or Joe Biden right now. Both are in an awful place. For Trump, it must be difficult enough to let the fact that he lost sink into his reality, let alone the widespread global celebrations that followed, which added insult to injury. For Biden, there is a mountainous effort ahead to win the trust and confidence of about half of the nation.
For the rest of us?
That’s the toughest call because, for anything good to come from all of this, we are the first ones who must make some changes. That’s where it becomes difficult because, for any systemic culture change, it must be bottom-up driven.
That means we must realize that we don’t have all the answers that we are not as bright as we think we are.
Just because we disagree with something or somebody does not mean that it is fake, that there is some vast, unknown, undocumented conspiracy out to get us.
It means that we cannot allow ourselves to lose our civility, even when we have bad examples of name-calling and degradation and prejudice.
It means we have to do a lot more work to educate ourselves. At the very least, go back and reboot our civics lessons from high school.
It means we must understand that there are professionals who have studied long and hard and practiced their trade for years who know a hell of a lot more about their world than we ever will before dismissing them because we disagree with what they do and how they do it.
It means we have to stop the hurtful and careless way we deal with each other on social media and how we conduct ourselves with people we call friends. Each time we launch some snarky comment, we are making a personal attack on people with whom we claim some kinship. It usually results in further unkind and ill-informed response aimed at payback that does nothing other than separate us even more. Unless, of course, we like the divisiveness that such bull-headed thinking results in.
Look, we’ve got lives to save, an economy to revive, social inequality that needs to be addressed. Rude, crude behavior will not help us fix those things.
None of us truly know how the next couple of months will play out or what else 2020 is waiting to lay on us, but I guarantee we will be better served to work together than on our own.
Let’s be honest here. I cannot tell you how I would feel if the election had gone the other way. I am, without question, more into the conciliatory mode because of how it turned out. Today’s piece would, undoubtedly, be much different in tone and content. I mean, I may be a nice guy at heart, but not that nice.
Still, while I am more confident and relieved at the moment, I’m not quite ready to go out and do that happy dance. There are too many unknowns that lie ahead, there is too much mischief that can go down between now and Jan. 20, 2021, and there is the possibility that the administration could try to extract some payback on the voters as a result of what went down during the past week. I’m at a point in life where very little surprises me anymore because we have become that unpredictable. The evolution from the nuclear family of the 1950s to the cyber family of the 2020s has been that erratic and something I’ll leave to the real social scientists to unravel. All I know is that our culture, our society has changed, and not for the better because we are the ones ultimately responsible for all the finger-pointing and suspicion that has led us so far apart. We are the people who have allowed unacceptable behavior to become acceptable. We are the people who have not held our fellow human beings, whether family, friend or elected official, accountable. We put up with bad behavior because we don’t want to ruffle feelings, make excuses for various personal and professional reasons, feel ineffectual or helpless, or are too lazy, too stubborn, or intellectually incapable. We participate in bad behavior because, well, to be heard, sometimes you’ve got to join in the shouting. The only way to win those engagements, unfortunately, is to go nuclear instead of talking things through. We would rather threaten or annihilate our opponents rather than deploy reason and respect.
How do we fix it?
I suggest a cold, hard, honest look in the mirror.
Then, maybe, we can think about a happy dance without fear of stepping on somebody’s toes.
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