A long day’s journey into night!

And, so, another presidential election has come and gone! And, all that has been said and done, all the feelings and trepidations held by so many are now in the past. The people have spoken and the current truth has replaced all other truths of the past.

Election day has always meant so much to me as a person alive and functioning on this planet. I dream of it for months and even years before it comes and the things that it will reveal about the America that I inhabit and what my fellow Americans think of those things that I hold so dear to my heart and soul. We were so worried about this election and what it might bring in the way of changes’ to this nation that we so love in so many diverse ways. The idea that a group of soulless billionaires might buy the peoples will bothered us to no end. That they might pervert it and bend it to their will through the simple use of cash was abhorrent to us.

All came out well in the end but there was still much gnashing of teeth along the way to that conclusion. It must be part of our passion that we have to so live for what one day can only rectify for us. We have been through so many election nights that did not come out well for us in the end. But, using the perspective of a lifetime love of baseball, we realize that the sun will rise again and that there will always be another chance to fight the good fight and, just perhaps, another season to bask in the sun of our beliefs and the fact that they might be accepted by a majority of those that we must spend the rest of our lives around.

We remember our first presidential election night. It was in November of 1960 and a young person just reaching the age of political consciousness could have not had a better lesson in political civics than what happened on that night. We were born of Republican stock and we were infuriated by John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency of the United States. We dreaded the days until Dwight David Eisenhower would have to give up the presidency to this young, upstart, whom we, as a neophyte republican, had so grown to dislike even before he was given a chance to do anything to earn our hate. Inauguration day came and went and, as the time went by, we became captivated with John Kennedy and his Irish ways with the people of this nation. We so loved his press conferences his humor and his family. They were young amidst a time when a nation that had fought the great war against evil were just coming into their prime. November 22, 1963 was such a shock for us. We had seen president Kennedy stare down the Russians in October of 1962 and the idea of a small, slim, man who had once immigrated to the Soviet Union taking a cheap mail order acquired rifle into a text book depository building and killing our hero and his Camelot put us into a state of mourning and shock that, in reality, took us, in so many ways, decades into manhood to really recover from. We finally reached a state of acceptance that came as we continually went through the process of maturity and aging.

We never really forgot the lessons that we learned from the Kennedy experience. It was for us as well as so many other Americans, a mile marker on the ever changing road of life. Had we been older it might not have meant so much but it took us at a time when impressions were being formed and opinions just as well.

This election and this presidential campaign that preceded it have both added to and benefited from our past experiences with other events just like it but, in their own ways, always unique unto themselves. It would have been hard for us to accept that the first person of a non white color to be elected to the presidency of this nation might be tossed out of office by a people seduced by the charms of a plutocrat with ties to so many states that he might be called the first truly national candidate to ever run for the office. In Barack Obama’s first election it was hard to tell if they were really voting for him or against what had gone on through the preceding eight years. All of that was washed away on November sixth when he stood before us and the nation to again reaffirm the things that he had professed just four years ago. On election night of 2008 Barack Obama told the nation that he had run to give his children the chance of living into the twenty second century with the hope that it might still contain some of the values and virtues that he and his wife held dear.

Barack Obama was re-elected as what he was and not as the anti-Bush!

And, just like so many successful presidents before him, Barack Obama had grown in the office and had matured under the strains and the challenges and the opportunities that the presidency always gives those who get the singular chance to occupy it for the time that they get to do so. American presidents, we think, have, at least the successful ones, a sense of time and history that is given to few others who inhabit the worlds stage. They go by the phrase “on my watch� as they perpetually look at the time left allotted to them before this fine old democracy, in all of its infinite wisdom, tells them that it is time to let go and let someone else with different ideas and perspectives take their place as they exit stage left. Few, if any, other nations have such an exacting timetable honored for so long that lets those who aspire to the office know before they ever begin that this is to be the time that they have to be upon the worlds stage.

Barack Obama is one of a very few American presidents reelected from the Democratic party in the normal course of things in the last one hundred years. He joins Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton in this respect. In the corollary, if Mitt Romney had been elected, he would have been the first republican president to have done so without a Nixon or Bush name attached to either the presidency or the vice presidency since 1928.

Not everyone has been fortunate enough to have been educated in the ways of civil discourse and politics as we have over the course of our lives. It has enriched us and made election days something to both look forward to and to dread depending on the changing fortunes of the times. But the one thing that we know so very well is that every four years there is going to be the opportunity to do it and experience it all over again. And, that, we think, might simply be the longer view that comes with maturity and with age. America marks its passages with notations as to which leader was in power when they occurred. And, certain individuals mark their lives with those same notations. Our singular wish for the future is that it might always be so. It is a comfort as old age creeps up that so many of us take as the march of history and events carries on.

And now we begin to look toward November eighth, 2016 and another long days journey into night! As we look safely back from the far shore of our victory we must also think for awhile on the vanquished foe. There will be an absence and a void in our life for a while that Mitt Romney alone could fill. It has been said that the magnitude of ones victory is enhanced by the size and abilities of ones foe. Romney confused us as much as anything as he grappled with his own demons but the person that we saw vanquished in defeat who spoke so eloquently on election night will always make us wonder whom the real person really was. And, in the dark hours that are to come that always inhabit a presidency and a people, we may look back and wonder where another road might have led!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.