Election Reflection

It was one of those rare evenings when Dad stayed home after supper. Mom had put together a batch of the genuine Chex mix (complete with real butter and Worcestershire sauce; not the mass produced stuff that you find in stores today). Fitzmorris Elementary had let us students cast our votes during the day, a faux-election which went well for Richard M. Nixon (predominantly Republican Jefferson County was openly suspicious of John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism). So there we were, the Methodist preacher and his family sitting down to a black-and-white (literally, and perhaps figuratively) report of the polls as they started coming in. There was school the next day, and when it became obvious that the counting was going to continue throughout the night I was sent to bed without knowing until the next morning that JFK was the new president. It’s hard to believe that was all nearly a half-century ago, and to believe that in a scant eight years more Nixon would introduce criminality to the White House. I suspect that the call for Obama will be made relatively early this evening, thanks to the technological progress since 1960. Then, we hung on every new vote that was added to the board. Now, we are inundated by more information than we know what to do with. In many ways, the election of a Roman Catholic was a new beginning for America, a chance to rethink our prejudices. That’s the similarity I see with today’s election. We have before us the opportunity to become the nation we claim we want to be. It will be interesting to watch what we do with our second chance.