Can't we all just get along?

Things are quieter here today, and I’m glad. No more negative political ads on TV. Less news stories about the election. But, in their places, I’ve been seeing and hearing things that are even more disturbing to me.


I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run across in the past 48 hours who seem to sincerely believe that Barack Obama being elected President is the scariest thing that they can imagine. The people responsible for hanging effigies of Obama in Kentucky, Indiana, Oregon, and California agree with that sentiment. So do many Christian conservatives.

Steve Sang, publisher of Charisma magazine, recently sent a mass email to Charisma’s distribution list with the subject line “Life As We Know It Will End if Obama is Elected.” Focus on the Family published a fictional letter from a Christian in 2012--which forecasted an end to faith-based adoption, traditional definitions of marriage, informed consent rules for abortion, laws against child pornography, Christian books, home schooling, and the Boy Scouts—in the weeks before the election. [Full text of the letter available here. It’s worth the read.]

And now, (for them, at least) the unthinkable has happened. In the past two days, I’ve come in contact with people who are stockpiling food and water for the coming riots which they’re calling “the war at home,” praying that Barack Obama will “find Jesus” before his inauguration, and reading Revelation with renewed fervor in speculation that the Apocalypse is coming now since Obama is clearly the Anti-Christ.

Conservatives are good at fear—feeling it and spreading it—partially because it’s such a big part of their theology. (I say that as a recovering conservative.) And they’ve done a good job of fear-mongering in the weeks and months and even years leading up to this election.

But let’s take a step back, friends. We have democratically elected a President of the United States. There are almost no reports of voter fraud. There was record voter turn-out. More people than ever were given a fair chance at choosing the person to lead our country, and they did. Decisively. Maybe I'm crazy, but that’s not my worst case scenario.



In its life, our country has survived a Revolution, westward expansion, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution, the women’s suffrage movement, the Great Depression, the New Deal, two World Wars, the Japanese internment, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, segregation, the civil rights movement, Watergate and innumerable other political scandals, the Cold War, and the September 11 attacks.

I can’t imagine how anyone thinks we could find a way to endure the division, the hardship, and the uncertainty of all of those events, but not be able to survive whatever the Obama presidency holds—good or bad. The thing we should be the most afraid of is our own reaction to the fear we’re feeling about the future.

The future is coming, whether we want it to or not. And that’s a good thing, since we can’t live in the past forever. Instead of dreading the future and clinging to some false belief that things were perfect in some by-gone days, let’s welcome it. Let’s embrace hope instead of fear.

Let’s do what we can to make our country stronger and our future better. That’s what the founding fathers were concerned with—much more so than abortion, or prayer in schools, or carrying concealed weapons, or anything else I’ve heard people recently explain were fundamentally intended in their actions.

They were about freedom. They were about democracy. They were about giving people a voice. Sometimes, when you give people a voice, they don’t say what you want them to. But that’s still better than keeping them silent. Or at least it was according to the people who formed our country.

Whether you like it or not, we’re all in this together. Isn't it time we started acting like it?