Editorial: The Election & A Moral Compass

At about 3:30 a.m. yesterday, our esteemed editor posted the following brief comment on social media: “On Tuesday’s election: Disaster averted. Damage assessment due. Let’s press on, lovers of life!”
Truly, much has yet to be sorted out from Tuesday’s midterm, arguably the most important election in the recent history of the U.S. because of the extent to which the very validity of elections in America was being called into question from among the highest corridors in the land that had triggered a bloody insurrection.

The results that really mattered out of this election were positive. First and foremost, the momentum for a huge “red tsunami” of election deniers was crushed.

Donald Trump came away from the election battered and bruised. His candidates fared very poorly overall, leaving him with little traction to push ahead with a re-election bid, and instead a hefty pile of legal matters, including almost certain indictments, now in his face.

Politics is a very unforgiving game, and Mr. Trump is certainly going to feel the effects of that truism. He’s going to be dumped into a ditch alongside the road like a bothersome and ungrateful hitchhiker. It won’t be pretty, and even his pal Putin, no Good Samaritan he, will be most reluctant to dust him off and take him in.

As with the other key inflection points of recent years, it has been the American people, the American electorate, which has stepped up to save America, at least for the time being. On the other hand, the professional pundits should be required to act like the suckers who are now being intimidated by peer pressure and often very real personal financial hardship into betting on sporting events online. Those pundits should have to pay when they glibly comment on an election and the results are nothing like what they tried to get us to believe.

What was the pundits’ single biggest misdirection this time? It was the shallow and myopic assertion that the Supreme Court’s reversal on Roe Vs. Wade would not be a decisive factor in the election. It is a sad remnant of our residual a male supremacist society that resulted in such a key blunder, born of a combination of male privilege and ignorance and of the well-meaning unwillingness of women to let people think they’d put their own interest ahead of what they’re being told are the more important matters, such as the economy. Only toward the very end was evidence acknowledged of this issue’s importance in this election.

In every single measure across the U.S. where the matter of abortion involved, voters opted for greater, not less, access.

The long-term value of this horrid period in our nation’s history will hopefully be a sustainable revival in the average citizen’s appreciation for the challenges they need to share for the value and sustenance of democracy.

Institutions of strong moral suasion are called on to step up like they haven’t since the 1960s, to offer a moral compass for a dizzy, aimless society.