We are deeply troubled, deeply divided, and deeply unsure. Unsure of the future, unsure of the policies that the United States continues to perpetuate, unsure of what happens next, unsure of the motives behind the November 2nd Presidential election. The election has demonstrated, as many have put it, the continuing divide between two halves of the nation.
Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times writes:
We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.
Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us – instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?
— Thomas Friedman, “Two Nations Under God”, The New York Times, November 4, 2004
The election somehow reminded me of the movie The American President. Conveniently, I wasn’t the only one:
The consequence of a misinformed American electorate is illustrated in the movie, “The American President”, starring Michael Douglas. Douglas plays Andrew Shepherd, a Wisconsin liberal up for re-election but unwilling to engage his Republican rival, Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), in a character debate. Consequently Shepherd’s approval ratings fall as Rumson’s rhetoric pummels him. Lewis Rothschild (Michael J. Fox), the President’s Domestic Advisor, finally tells Shepherd in a heated debate that, “People want leadership, Mr. President, and Rumson’s the only one doing the talking. People want leadership, and in the absence of genuine leadership they’ll listen to anyone who walks up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so desperate for it that they’ll swim in a mirage in the desert, and when they find there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.”
Shepherd looks at Rothschild a moment and replies, “Lewis, we’ve had beloved Presidents who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flash light. They don’t drink the sand because they think it’s water. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”
Yesterday, fifty-one percent of the American electorate didn’t know the difference.
— Stephen Mitchell, “Envisioning the Future”, November 4, 2004
His obvious implication is that Bush supporters didn’t know the difference, but I step beyond that here and even risk saying that 100% of American voters didn’t know the difference. While those who voted for Kerry may or may not have had a better grasp of what was going on, there’s still, as Friedman put it, a sense of “my team, your team” — it just happens that one team won with a slim margin, essentially ensuring no change in U.S. national policy.
What does it say when, out of 11 states that put an anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment, most states pass that amendment? Indeed, Mr. Friedman, what happened to our country? What happened to who we are? What happened to the Constitution, the civil rights movement, women’s rights? Are we so blind that we can’t recognize that all rights are human rights, and that we do not stand in the way of one man’s love of another man, one woman’s love of another woman, or their right to express that love through the sanctification of marriage? Where are we when we begin to ignore basic civil liberties, when the words “liberty and justice for all” don’t mean a thing?
This election says a lot about us as a nation. I find myself fearful that, with international opinion of the United States at a very low point, it stands to get still lower if we don’t begin to seriously reflect on who we are as a country and where we want to be. We drink the sand right now as a nation because we don’t realize it’s not water. Where’s the humanity, the respect for all that presumably so embodies our nation? We need to find it, and we need to find it quickly. All may not be lost if we don’t, but we’re stumbling down a road in the pitch black of night.
A cliff lies ahead of us.