Good Morning
I spent forty years as a high school track coach. I loved the competition, the intense effort my kids would make to support their team. Improvement was good, winning was even better, and the camaraderie of our team was everything.
One of my favorite times as a coach, was early in the morning at a meet before the competition began. The track was calm, the kids slowly waking up and warming up. There wasn’t the intensity yet, just the ritual of getting ready. We were relaxed, prepared, and confident in what we could do. It was the “calm” time, before the cheering and the clapping, when everything was possible.
Everything was possible. The highs and lows of seventeen events, from shot put to pole vault to two mile, to the final 4×400 relay; were yet to occur. All of the work and planning; the “blood, sweat and tears” of Churchillian fame, was done. It was the cusp of change: everything would be different when it was over.
It was the same in my “previous life” as a political campaigner on the dawn of Election Day. Whatever the polling and the “talking heads” on television had said; it was the day of decision. Everything was still possible. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign did a great commercial: “It’s Morning Again in America.” It captured the essential concept of morning, and Reagan, as a new beginning (it also was turned into a great Folger’s Coffee commercial theme.)
It’s Election Day morning in America again, and everything is possible.
Folks are lining up at their polling places: they are making up their minds. We don’t know what the collective mind of America will decide this day, but they definitely have three choices. America can choose the minority view that gained control two years ago, where, that day, our entire world was “turned upside down.” Or, America might show its confusion, and send mixed messages to itself and the world. The split that exists in America might be further exposed, raw and bleeding, waiting for salve, but instead scoured even more.
Or Americans might do what they have been doing in almost every special election since 2016: reject the polarization and crassness of the Trump Presidency, and choose a different path. It happened in Alabama, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and almost in Georgia and Ohio. It may happen today, and we will wake up tomorrow to a different “Morning in America.”
So I sit in our camper in Florida, the hotbed of the “split” in American life. Like the beginning of that track meet, everything is possible. However it all turns out tonight (and onto tomorrow, as counting may take more than just a few hours) today is one of the times I am proudest to be American. We will all decide today, with more and more Americans taking part in determining their future. It is the essence of what our country, a Constitutional Republic, founded in the compromises of the eighteenth century and forged in the blood and labor of history, is about.
It’s Election Day in America. Everything is possible.
