Amazing... and, One day to Go
Above is an election map of a scenario where both candidates, Obama and McCain, tie - each having 269 electoral collage votes. There are several scenarios that can produce such a tie, because there are a total of 538 electoral collage votes, but I was struck as I looked upon this particular version of what could happen.
Does this image strike anyone else the way it strikes me?
Do you see the division - North versus South?
I was amazed, and sat back in my chair as I pondered this. Haven't we come a long way since our Civil War, over 150 years ago, when Americans were literally fighting other Americans over politics, race, and economics? I want to say yes, but as I have witnessed and experienced such division in these last days leading up to the election, I have to take pause and really wonder if we have, indeed, come very far at all.
Certainly we have as a society made advances - women and minorities can now vote (with an equal vote, not three-fifths), although for a plethora of reasons (some that are nefarious and some not so much so), minorities still do not make their voice heard as much as they could. Perhaps that will change with this election, and I do hope that is the case.
And we have advanced as a society in so many ways - technologically, sociologically, scientifically, biologically, astronomically; and maybe not so much in a few other ways - environmentally, religiously, governmentally (?).
I do continue to believe that we have the very best system of politics in the world, and I can't help but remember a couple of quotes about Democracy:
"Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials." -Will Rogers
And several more from one prominent American you may recognize:
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government."
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education."
The previous were taken from Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of our very constitution.
But I still wonder, as I sit here, a mere 24 hours from the next - and possibly most important - election of my lifetime, that there is still so much further to go. We can and should (yes, should) strive for so much more than we already have achieved. We mustn't stop. When I look at the electoral map, it's easy to become disheartened, and think that, no, we really are that far apart - still. And yet, I do have hope. There are those among us who still believe in bringing out the very best, rather than the very worst. And it is around those that we must rally as we move forward in this very complicated world.
I know I'm sounding a whole lot like Keith Olbermann (or Ben Affleck playing him) right now, which is not such a bad thing to me. Sure, Keith can be a little over the top and overly dramatic [to say nothing of what may come of Ms. Precious Perfect], but if you listen to the substance of what he speaks (which I do), there is a lot there.
So with that, I will sign off, in anticipation of what is to come, and knowing that no matter what, God's will shall be done. And I shall leave with one last quote:
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried" -Sir Winston Churchill
Good night, and good luck.
~Steve
[Sorry Keith Olbermann and Edward R. Murrow, I had to do it.]