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Texas : Features : Columns : Letters From North America :

After the Election

by Peary Perry
Peary Perry

Mark my words. By the time you read this column it will all be over but the shouting. Someone will have won the election and someone will have lost. Be that as it may, what I predict is that wholesale shopping and entertainment will soar the weekend after the election.

At my house, I have taken to my bed to read every night for about the past month since I am fed up with the election coverage. I know what I believe and am refusing to stuff my brain with any more details that I have heard over and over again for the past year or so. This has been the longest political campaign in my history. I am worn out.

You can tell who is a political junkie; you see them on the street each day walking around looking like someone from the night of the living dead. Those vacant eyes staring off into space, the drool drying on the corners of their mouths and their hair all askew from positioning themselves in a prone position in front of a large screen television for hours and hours on end. Many of America’s women will likely flock to beauty parlors all over the country after Tuesday of next week to get the creases taken out of their hair. The health clubs will once again be overwhelmed as men will return in droves to lose those extra pounds they have accumulated from months of ‘comfort’ foods. We are all political zombies at this point in time. This election has occupied the conversations of nearly every meeting and social event I have attended for at least the past seven or eight months. I’ll be glad when it’s all over and done with and I know a lot of others who feel the same.

My wife refuses to go quietly into the night and I can hear her talking back to the television late into the night while I try to concentrate on some murder mystery paragraph which I know I have read at least ten times. I try not to listen to her, but I find it impossible and then have to run downstairs from time to time to see if I missed anything. Usually it was for naught, since it was something all of us had heard a hundred times before just repeated in a different manner. Never once since we started the campaign has the television ever answered any of her pithy comments.

This election has virtually paralyzed the entire nation. If you ask anyone what they are doing for upcoming holidays, the standard answer goes something like… “I don’t know, we’re waiting to see how the election turns out.” The entire world seems to be holding its collective breath waiting to see who is going to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Now, listen to me…whatever happens the end is not here. We will all survive just as we have done in the past. All is not lost no matter how this turns out. Abe Lincoln once said something along the lines of … “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Well said and very appropriate for this election.

No, the American people cannot all be fooled all of the time. One person will untimely be elected to the highest office in our land. That person will have to earn and maintain the respect of the nation or they will not succeed. We have seen this happen time after time.

Campaign promises are just those, promises. But the problem is the people listen and expect those promises to be put into effect. If not and they are broken the citizens will remember and react accordingly.

In years gone by, it would have been easier for elected officials to get way with saying one thing and then doing another, but not today. With all of the resources we have at our fingers, the internet, cell phones, cable television, blogs, nothing major happens that isn’t available to the world in a matter of minutes. Politicians who lie and mislead are found out and brought to task for their misdeeds. Even those residing in the White House.

So, do not be dismayed. No matter if your candidate loses this election, the nation will survive and the pendulum will swing back to the correct position. It may take a while, but it will happen. Do not lose faith and do not give up just because your party may have lost. In spite of all that has been done and said over the past year, we are all still Americans and we should act like Americans.

There will be another day and another campaign to fight.

Right now, we just need to get out of the house, go to a restaurant and get some sun.

Have a good week.

© Peary Perry
November 5, 2008 column
More Letters From North America
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Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com

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