Reneging Once Again on My Vow to Leave Politics Out of My Blog

In the past 24 hours I’ve seen many posts and comments online with the common thread, “I’m terrified for our country” because of one or another outcomes of yesterday’s election.

I’m bewildered. I feel many things about our country, about this latest election. Fear isn’t one of them.

Last night when I stepped into the classroom I was greeted with a chorus of voices asking if we could get out early. Several students were hoping to get to the polls before they closed; the rest wanted to watch election results. During the short forty minutes we held class laptops and cell phones were open and every few minutes someone would call out the latest updates from the polls.

I teach at a university that had the second-highest voter registration in the country. Only Berkeley beat us out. Far from being manipulated by a liberal media—an accusation I’ve heard leveled at this new generation of voters—these “voting virgins” are engaged, sophisticated, and thoughtful citizens. They think carefully about the issues facing our country. They listen to their parents. They look to history and ahead to the future. They are deeply concerned with the long-range ramifications of political process, for their children, our nation, and our world.

When I voted yesterday it was a quick and painless process. I didn’t have to travel long distances to exercise that privilege. I wasn’t afraid of violent reprisals against me or my family. There weren’t any soldiers with machine guns standing guard. What an incredible country!

We’re living in economic uncertainty and troubled times. Given our national lack of financial responsibility it’s quite likely to get worse before it gets better. We’ll survive. We’re living with increasingly polarized tensions over civil rights and religious liberties issues, and there don’t seem to be any easy answers. We’ll survive. We’re engaged in a global war on terrorism that is pointing out previously unimagined vulnerabilities in our national security. We’ll survive. In fact, we’ll thrive.

This isn’t a starry-eyed Pollyanna complex. Like most citizens, there are social and political issues facing our nation that concern and worry me. Yet I see so many more reasons to rejoice.

Who would have thought that less than a century after women won the right to vote, we’d be in the middle of an election year with an unprecedented number of strong female candidates, for nearly every office, including the vice-presidential ticket? It’s a far cry from the days when medical textbooks taught the ‘scientific fact’ that women’s brains were incapable of intellectual thought because they were smaller. And just forty years after desegregation, who could have imagined that we’d elect our first black president? I tucked my babies into bed last night with the realization that the world Martin Luther King dreamed was so much more a reality than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

That’s what it’s all about, I believe. We live in a nation that constantly seeks to become better, to learn from the past, to learn from mistakes, to improve upon what we have. It might take a long time, it might be painful, but we never quit trying. We’ve survived Republican leadership; we’ve survived Democratic leadership. We’ve survived hostage crises, economic depressions, energy shortages, world wars, and 9/11. Heck, we’ve survived O.J.’s glove, Monica Lewinsky’s dress, and Paris Hilton’s videos—we’re not about to fall apart because of one election.

Our future is incredibly bright. I look at my students, my children, and I know we are in good hands. More importantly, I look to Him who notes the sparrow’s fall, and I know we are in good Hands. How can I feel anything other than hopeful?