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| I know how Tim feels. But he doesn't get much practice |
I hate losing. I hate losing basketball
games. I hate losing trials and appeals. I hate losing elections.
Basketball games are just that—games. I can get over it (eventually). Trials
and appeals involve much more: disappointed clients, perhaps a financial setback,
and a toll on the psyche by way of a loss of self-confidence and the attendant rise
of self-doubt. And losses in some elections are also vexing. Elections can have
a stake well beyond my ego or my personal interest. Elections shape our
collective future, not definitively, but significantly. The outcomes of
elections often arise from the most appalling of causes. Our collective future
rests in the hands of a cognitive equivalent of a drunk driver.
Will the Republic survive the election of
No-Nothing* majority in both houses of Congress? Probably. We survived Bush.
But all of this does dismay me. We have significant issues in front of us, such
as global climate change with the challenges that it entails and the continued
legalized corruption of our political system. Iowans (not this one!) elected a
Koch Brothers' candidate purchased with millions in contributions and whose
stance on global climate change is standard issue head-in-the-sand.
Perhaps I'm all fired-up about nothing.
That's the common attitude: "It's all a bunch of just politics anyway. Who
cares? They're all full of shit." I wish that I could believe that. “Damn
you Learning for leading me to believe these things important!” Philosophy and popular opinion have been at war in the West since the demos put Socrates to death in Athens centuries ago. No wonder
Socrates' student Plato had such a jaundiced view of democracy.
I've been on the losing side of elections
since I campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1960 (yes, I campaigned—in my
second-grade way—for Nixon). Later it was Norman Erbe for governor, Bill
Scranton for the Republican presidential nomination, Goldwater for president,
and so on. On and on. Maybe I should campaign for the candidate I want to lose.
I even debated for Goldwater in 1964 in front of my 6th grade class only to
lose decisively in the vote of my classmates—in a county that was one of only
six that voted in favor of Goldwater in Iowa that year. Wow. No wonder I have
an interest in persuasion: I don't have a good track record, do I? Chalk up
another loss.
So what do I do now? I'll listen to the
second movement of Beethoven's Seventh and to Stravinsky's Firebird, waiting
for the Finale that prompts me to think of the firebird as a phoenix that rises
from the ashes. It works after basketball games (well, back in the day), after
losing cases, and after losing elections. It reminds me that although I'm
bummed and discouraged, so much more so the candidates who gave it their all,
the men and women in the arena who fought the good fight in front of a mostly
unknowing and unappreciative audience. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves
off, and climb back into the saddle, like a cowboy tossed into the dust by an buckin' bronc'. It hurts, but you gotta do what gotta do.
We'll be back.
*I can't bear to refer to them as
Republicans. The heirs of Lincoln, TR, Ike—hell, even Nixon—not to mention other outstanding leaders? No, they have gone too far to deserve the
designation. They are RINOs to me, body-snatchers who have taken a name but who
refuse the mantle of the heritage.
