If you would be kind and humor me, I'd like to share a story. One of my kids had a really - and I mean barely holding on by the merest strip of tissue - loose tooth. She was distraught over the idea this eye tooth would fall out as she slept and be lost, depriving her of that sweet sweet Tooth Fairy loot. As dads do, I told her we can pop that sucker out in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Queue meltdown. Queue terror. Queue dad becoming exasperated at her insistence she can't sleep with it in, and she won't have it out. We had reached that proverbial spot between having our cake and eating it too from fear of a very small thing.
Now, lest you think me heartless, I knew for her the fear she felt was real. The tiny reality of the situation had no bearing on what she was experiencing. My job as dad was to walk her through controlling that emotion and then doing the work even when it's uncomfortable.
Our good members of the press have been parsing August 20, candidates for office have been crowing or mourning, and social media is aflame with opinions of all stripes. If everything written came to fruition, our great state and great nation will descend into chaos founded on bullying and lies while being a fascist, communist, den of hedonistic debauchery, all while being a dystopian theocracy. Phew. Talk about scary.
I don't have good data on this and am relying, to borrow from my teen's vernacular, on the vibe, it feels like every election cycle the language and fear mongering around candidates is the only thing becoming dystopian. I've lived through 24 election cycles and experienced at least half as many through one level of participation or another. Enough to have a good vibe check anyway. What I've noticed, and if I'm wrong, smarter folks than me will say so, is that our toilets still flush, our kids play sports, and we gather around the water cooler to talk about what the elected folks have screwed up today all without fear that we will go hungry, be arrested, or sent to a re-education camp. A win no matter your political flavor.
Like my daughter's tooth trial, we give more credit to fear and less to reality too often. Yes, the political landscape shifted on August 20. Friends of mine succeeded and friends lost, people with ideas I don't like lost and won, and people with ideas I like won and lost. Nothing actually radically shifted. People who are strongly aligned with the Freedom Caucus won enough seats to have a go at governing. To crib from my eldest's favorite musical, "Ah, winning is easy, my son, governing's harder." It is easy to say no and easy to promise to dismantle things. Much like dadding, governing requires getting disparate groups to cooperate for the benefit of each other.
In the end, my daughter took a deep breath, hugged her favorite stuffy, and, while squeezing my fingers hard enough to leave a mark, let me pop that pesky tooth right out. Once it was over, she laughed from relief. She discovered she was a whole lot tougher than she knew.
Our nation and our state are much tougher than we give credit. We made it through two world wars, assassinations, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Vietnam War, and Monica Lewinsky. We watched the wall come down in Berlin and stared down Russia in Cuba. We mourned together when cowards killed our fellow citizens on September 11, and we came together when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. An election cycle isn't going to make or break us, as long as we remember who we are.
For my part, I believe in community and the dream that America is the Shining City on the Hill. The dream that neither any government nor any man has the authority to override our inalienable rights. We are individually responsible to serve each other as neighbors as much as we are to keep our noses out of each other's business. I believe the next session of our Wyoming Legislature sees our elected legislators (many of whom are my friends whether in the Freedom, Wyoming, or, gasp, Democratic Caucus) ready to do the work necessary to best serve the citizens of our state. Bickering and finger pointing is for children. I say tell it to the tattle tree and get back at it.
Regardless, there are too many good and decent people who get up every day, have a cup of joe, and go out to do their part to make our beautiful society function to give into despair over the Chicken Little antics so many use to lure us into clicking. We've got this because we are Americans. We've got this because we make up the greatest state of our great nation, Wyoming. We've got this because, in our corner of the world, community matters most.
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