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Election Day Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

3 November 2020

Today is Election Day in the U.S., not Armageddon as you may have heard. We'd be happy that it's also the end of election season if we weren't concerned that a close race in several states might prolong the contest. We do hope that won't be the case. For the sake of the country and the world at large.

Quite a few months ago we were taking the bus across town and saw this young fellow sitting across from us. We had to laugh, remembering the days when people wore little buttons with catchy phrases like, "I Like Ike" instead of carrying huge signs around to profess their allegiances.

Of course that isn't what he's doing. He's a volunteer and he's taking a sign somewhere, maybe home to put in the front window of his apartment.

But he's doing something else we find quite moving. He's reading.

Every four years about this time, we feel quite firmly that our better angels will put trumpet to lips and wail like Wynton Marsalis.

Every four years about this time, we feel quite firmly that our better angels will put trumpet to lips and wail like Wynton Marsalis. We're not always right. But we always make the same mistake.

We assume that the people who listen to radio and watch TV for their news know what we know from reading reputable publications.

We know better. Entertainment is not journalism, after all. But it's hard to make the adjustment. Once we've become aware of something, we think everybody else must have already known it. But it's still a world in which people see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe.

The truth often seems just outside the reach of our actual experience even if we all feel the facts as real forces in our lives. Our better angels, who never entirely desert us, try to understand the things we find inexplicable rather than condemn them.

Like the young man in our picture.

So despite what some people may believe or even just fear, today will not be Armageddon.

But we hope it's one of those Election Days in which our faith in our fellow citizens is not misplaced.


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