For use: Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2000 and thereafter

 

mfinley.com: "Pass the Test"

by Michael Finley

Has anyone out there wondered why this election went the way it did?

I don’t mean the final result. I mean, why was it so strange from the moment it began?

Everywhere you look, our country seems ripped down the middle:

Popular vote -- 48.9 percent to 48.9 percent -- split by three tenths of a percent (with the loser winning).

Electoral vote -- 267 to 271 votes.

The two Supreme Courts in the news rules with split verdicts, 5-4 (United States) and 4-3 (Florida).

The Senate -- divided into two perfect halves. 50-50 (with one half somehow holding a majority).

In Congress, a mere 5-vote difference out of 435.

In state legislatures, power is split more closely than it has been in 50 years. Republicans control both chambers in 17 states, Democrats in 16; in the others, control is 50-50.

Have you wondered why this is?

The only opinion I have heard is that the two parties are so similar that voters split between them. Excuse me, but that doesn’t make even a little bit of sense. They could be identical and votes could still be lopsided. And I don't think they are identical, by a long shot.

Is it a freak accident, a flipped coin landing on its edge? "It had to happen sometime in a million years, and it happened in 2000 AD."

Here's a thought. Maybe the election is a test. Maybe some higher power -- call it "God" -- wants to see what this weird, wonderful, ungrateful country is of in the year 2000.

I think Israel faced a test this past summer -- whether the religious leaders of the Palestinians and Jews could relax their guard and live together in faith, or whether they would enlist their faith in bloody war. They failed the test.

Our test was to fashion an election so difficult that it would strain everyone to the breaking point, until the victor will envy the vanquished, and the vanquished will envy the dead.

Drive partisans to such extremes that they lose all ability to empathize with the points the other side is making. I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.

Whittle the branch of citizenship and sacrifice for the group down to the bare stick of bitterness and self-pity.

Having been given a bushel of lemons, will we hurl sour citrus at one another, or find a way to sweeten it and make lemonade?

Because I find this statistical tie-that-isn’t-a-tie spooky as hell. It feels like a set-up. Is that a camera hidden in that bush? Our every reaction is being fitted to a laugh-track.

Here we are, the richest people ever, with resources and traditions and insanely good luck that any other country would kill for, voting for candidates neither side cared much for 36 days ago -- yet in the past month both sides felt they were in danger of losing something as precious as a child.

What is this for?

I'll tell you my grievances. I think of George W. Bush proclaiming Jesus Christ to be his political mentor. But in Florida Jim Baker replaced Jesus Christ, and it was far from a turn-the-other-cheek, love-your-enemy display of values.

If anything, the figure led bloody-footed through the long night from the Sanhedrin to the Procurator and up the Via Dolorosa was Bush's opponent.

Maybe if we play a game of truth, we can find redemption. I offer these personal concessions up front:

I am glad, as a Democrat, that the incorrectly corrected absentee votes in those two counties were allowed.

I don't think the GOP protesters in Miami, though organized, "shut down" the recount. The enormity of the task was the reason canvassers threw in the towel.

I agree, "dimpled chads" are a rotten standard to judge ballots by.

I have no idea who would have won a completely counted Florida vote total.

What I would like to hear from the other side is whether there is any regret anywhere that the Palm Springs ballot design invalidated 19,000 votes in a heavily Democratic area, and what that implies for their victory.

I would like to hear that it is unfortunate for the country, not lucky for the GOP, that the Governor of Florida is his George Bush's brother.

That the Secretary of State who certified his slate of electors was his statewide campaign manager.

That the five-judge Supreme Court majority which stopped the recount waited until 90 minutes before the Dec. 12 deadline to regret the lack of time left, thus handing the presidency to the son of the man who named them to the bench -- and to the man who would likely name their successors.

I was resigned a week or so ago to Gore's defeat. (Voting for Gore means dying many deaths.)

But I held out hope, almost like a kid, that the Supreme Court would pull a It's a Wonderful Life ending out of its constitutional hat, a solution that may have been light on law, but spoke powerful to the dark unease that exists among us all about power and democracy in America.

know life seldom ends in a laundry basket full of offerings, that we seldom leave the larger theater wiping a tear away. Frank Capra is dead, and Clarence the Angel was just a story device

But maybe someone is watching anyway, looking down on our cold, cold winter.

Are we going to pull it together, or let it drift apart? Are we going to ever look at this mess, and look at one another, and say, "We made this. Now we have to make it right."

Pray we pass this difficult test.

 

 

 

Got a suggestion on how to start the healing? Send them to me at mfinley@mfinley.com, and I'll publish them at mfinley.com/articles/pass-the-test.htm.

The Healing Game , by Van Morrison

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