It’s Election Day in America. For those citizens who haven’t already, now is the time to make your voice heard with the fundamental mechanism of democracy: your vote. If we’re to have a government for and by the people, as the founders intended and as we’ve imperfectly pursued in reaching for a more perfect union, that democratic duty is necessary.
Yet it is not alone sufficient, as we have another duty to uphold. Yes, we must vote on Election Day — and then we must get up all the following days and have respect enough for our institutions and care enough for our fellow Americans that we won’t attack them if the electoral outcome does not match one’s ballot preferences. There is a good chance that we won’t know the official outcome of this down-to-the-wire presidential race by the time most of us go to bed tonight.
Even when the excruciating uncertainty subsides, no matter the outcome, the next chief executive of the United States will be a figure with underwater national favorability ratings in a climate of growing division and polarization. The heat will be turned up in what is already a political tinder box. The messy but beautiful thing about democracy is that we the people are the keepers of the flame.
By the same power with which we can burn everything down, we also can light a way forward to a peaceful transition of power — the miracle of democracy. Last time, we saw an alarming glimpse of what taking for granted the peaceful transition of power porte.
