After the Election

I’ve been thinking a lot about politics lately, what with the election being this week and all, and even though I’m not sure I can say anything eloquent, I have to express a few things about it before I start screaming them at random people on the street. 

First of all, what on earth happened to common decency? I’m not saying that Republicans and Democrats have to make nice with each other all the time (although Congress would function much better if you guys could get on that - just saying), I’m talking about not being a horrible human being. I spend far too much of my time on Twitter, and there are countless tweets saying “it’s called the White House for a reason.” If you’re not racist, your instinct might be to say “yeah - because it’s white” but no, these people are getting at the fact that “OH MY GOODNESS WE HAVE A BLACK PRESIDENT AND THAT’S WRONG!” Seriously? You dislike Barack Obama, and the only reason you can think of is the color of his skin? Pick a policy, pick an action, pick a decision, pick The Affordable Care Act, but don’t pick race. It’s 2012, we should have gotten beyond race by now, and yet we have people on the Internet calling the President of the United States a “monkey” and a “nigger” and calling for his assassination.

And don’t think it doesn’t go both ways, because it does. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Mitt Romney, you should not be on Twitter asking for people to shoot him. That’s completely ridiculous - if everyone shot people because they don’t agree with them, there would be no one left (aside from the fact that murder is usually considered at least somewhat morally objectionable). Also, is it fair to make fun of people for insisting that Christians in the United States are being persecuted (which is pretty laughable) and then turn around and refer to Mitt Romney’s “magic underwear” and ridicule him for being Mormon? Haven’t we learned yet that just because it’s not exactly like us doesn’t mean it’s wrong, crazy, and foolish? 

All of that being said, we should absolutely mock politicians for staying stupid things. Luke McKinney of Cracked.com has already done this better than I ever could, so let me refer you to his article entitled “The 4 Craziest Scientific Theories Posed by U.S. Politicians”. The point is, we can’t take these people too seriously, even though we need to respect them as human beings. On a less ridiculous note, the country is not going to fall into a giant dumpster of sadness and despair because Obama was elected. It wouldn’t have if Romney had been elected either, and yet all we heard about the entire election was how it would be the end of America as we know it if [insert opposing candidate here] won. We need to remember that politicians are not NEARLY as important as they like to believe.

I guess what I’m saying is, who gets elected president or senator or mayor is not all that important to our day-to-day lives, and yet we all (myself included, I’m afraid) act like if our favorite candidate doesn’t get elected, the world as we know it will come to an end. Do we have that little faith in American politics? We’re a democracy. Even if we did manage to elect a crazy person who wanted to become a communist dictator, there are checks and balances in place to keep that from happening. 

The last thing we should all remember is that this is how democracy works. Immediately after the election was called in Obama’s favor, Donald Trump lost his brains on Twitter and started spewing about how this was a travesty, that everyone should storm Washington D.C. and start a revolution, and that this is not democracy. Actually, this is exactly what democracy looks like. Not everyone can get what they want, but in the end we have to trust that the people running our country are doing a much better job than we could do, and that either of those is much better than no government, and then we should shut up and get back to our own lives.