We can feel glad if billions of dollars in special interest money and a 40 year effort to bend the media in the US to the will of the multinational greed machine and all the efforts by the GOP to create a coalition of evangelicals and bigots and the backward do not quite work.
When Democrats pull together we can accomplish miracles. This has marked our history throughout the past century.
But there is a bigger picture and we need to face it. What is really going on here will not go away. It is a tectonic plate condition underlying our political landscape. We ignore this at our peril.
We are among the lucky few, given the entire history of the past 200,000 years. We may face a very difficult circumstance beginning to unfold. Can the earth really sustain 7 billion people becoming 10, or more?
This question strikes a lot of people as so abstract as to be irrelevant. I was arguing this recently with a friend of mine that I roomed with in 1976. Back then, there were 4 billion people on earth and population was already an issue. There are, just in that relatively short period, 3 billion more.
Resources are the issue, and climate change is one of the more prominent resource issues. More people burn more carbon and require more cars and more oil and more food, which requires oil to produce. Etc. Etc.
All these questions are there for the entire human race to become conscious of and to become mobilized in dealing with, regardless of who is elected.
Our entire spectrum of political debate is too narrow.
We work off the knowledge base that is available through the media and that is strictly limited by what drives advertising profit, popularity, entertainment and consumerism. What requires depth of thought and the kind of critical thinking that might lead one to think about things that are not in the media knowledge base, falls prey to a "chicken-and-egg" syndrome: What is not popular already doesn't get attention and what doesn't get attention doesn't get popular.
In consumer culture, profits govern what becomes popular.
And that may be the ultimate issue behind all the issues. How can the arguments be steered towards more intelligent consideration and policy formation if they are off the table and can't be put on it?
Why are the special interests trying to dominate the steering wheel of society? They are frightened at the prospect of losing their grip on profit making, which of course the in fact are.
But the tectonic plate level forces that shape our world are beyond even the most wealthy shapers of public opinion.
These questions have to fuel the work that we do:
Can we foster a rightful dialogue about these things, pushing the envelope? Can we, through genuine local action, create a long term growing consensus about the problems we face and the solutions? Can we promote leadership that can forward these ideas into governmental action?
Anytime you look at these questions, you face the same set of personal questions. Can I sustain an effort? What sort of effort should I put forward, given my own set of skills and capabilities? Who can I collaborate with, whether locally or anywhere?
Elections turn out to be the same dilemma over and over again between trying to get a word in edgewise for reality, versus sloganeering that manipulates people shamelessly. Given the sound bite nature of our political discourse overall, we are really careening towards a cliff that hardly anyone notices.
I have been contemplating the precedent for our current situation in the worst such cliff the human race has ever faced. We learned about this quite recently as DNA science has revealed this drama.
This was prior to the time humans began to migrate out of Africa. There was a very prolonged drought, lasting hundreds of years. During this time, game that the hunter gatherers depended on diminished to the point of nonexistence. There was a choice point.
Those who could not decide to change the way they were doing things, kept on hunting for the same animals that were no longer available. Those who could decide to change, discovered that if they moved to the seacoast, they could find a different kind of food there. The best estimate seems to be that as few as 600 people survived that period and produced descendants who went on to migrate out of Africa.
We could be faced with basically the same situation, if the number of people on the planet is not sustainable against a decreasing resource base. Whatever causes this, whether it be climate change, too much taking of seafood or other resources out of the ecosystem, too much pollution, disease pandemics, or whatever, these can be foreseen and the damage possibly mitigated to some extent.
But only if we develop an ability to communicate about what is important that is not currently in use in any widespread way.
We have a worldwide communication system. It involves everything we have ever learned how to do, from the invention of language and literature, to the distribution of published works, to the entire educational tradition represented by the university system, to the facility for supporting free and open dialogue on the internet.
Our problem, as a culture, is that we do not see it as a dire necessity to reach out to each other and to use a disciplined approach for deliberation in order to achieve any results.
We currently are stuck with pushing the envelope in terms of the pundit model we live with, the journalistic model we wish could be more prevalent, or the letter to the editor model.
A lot of what passes for dialogue is really a lot of people throwing letters to the editor at each other, more or less in the same way video games are played.
What is popular still gets popular, and what should be considered but isn't popular is still relegated to off-the-radar status.
Perhaps if Romney gets elected it will show us the necessity for getting it together, but it sure will be a more hostile environment.
Those who think a Romney win will mean that they have the luxury of saying they will never vote again will have to rethink that and if they believe in anything. What they really will need is to find some courage.
So will we all.
But that doesn't change if Obama wins. We may not face an immediately dark scenario, but the forces that are trying to buy Romney the White House are not going away. They will continue to make any inroads they can through ten thousand different pathways. We will have to guard them all.
The advantage might be that we will have seen the agenda and can anticipate better what we need to do, if we really think about it. And, we must.