Perspective

My Canadian pen pal Peggy e-mailed me after last Tuesday’s elections to ask if Lynn and I soon would be seeking asylum in her country. Although Peggy and I haven’t see each other in person since we met for the first and only time in Edmonton, Alberta, sometime in the late 1990s when I was there on a work assignment, she knows my politics well—from correspondence and this blog. She’d assumed correctly that I’d be displeased—to put it mildly—by the Republican romp that will give the GOP control of the US Senate come January, and its biggest majority in the House since 1930.

What I told her, however, was that she needn’t worry about our showing up at her and husband Bob’s door in Victoria, British Columbia, seeking refuge from at least two years of foxes guarding the henhouses of everything I hold dear (environmental protection, the social-safety network, etc). Rather, I remarked, when you feel certain, as I do, that we’re already on an inexorable path to the end of the world as we know it (see my September 5 post, “Sing a Song of Armageddon”), it’s hard to feel as if an electoral debacle is even the figurative end of the world.

Indeed, just a couple of days before Election Day, an article ran in the Washington Post that began on this gallows note, “The Earth is locked on an ‘irreversible’ course of climatic disruption from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the impacts will only worsen unless nations agree to dramatic cuts in pollution, an international panel of climate scientists warn.” The article’s gist, if you’ll forgive my paraphrasing, if that we’re already completely screwed, but, should the governments of the world unite in ebony-and-ivory harmony, in such a way that even a made-up optimist I'll call Stoner Pollyanna couldn’t conceive, our beleaguered planet might swirl down the drain to widespread drought, horrific flooding, and devastation on an unimaginable scale just a tad less rapidly.

I mean, sure, it’s maddening and depressing to me when Republicans Win Big at the polls on promises that they'll unfetter business to pollute more and will see to it that the national wealth is spread even more inequitably than it is now. But those polar ice caps were melting before November 4, and the sea levels continue to rise. We all have bigger fish to fry—pun inadvertent but apt, as one of this morning’s newspaper headlines was “Larger Ocean ‘Dead Zones’—Oxygen-Depleted Water—Likely Because of Global Warming.”

Which is not to say that I’m happy about last week’s results at the polls, or that I’m feeling particularly conciliatory toward the two-thirds of eligible Americans who didn’t bother to vote, leaving a passive nation to the government it arguably deserves. Even here in Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a two-to-one margin, we’ve now got a Republican governor-elect because too few Democrats bothered to turn out. (I also fault the camp of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, which ran such a safe and uninspired gubernatorial campaign that its spokesperson should’ve been Mad magazine’s Alfred E “What, Me Worry” Neuman.)

I’ve already read, by the way, that my governor-to-be, an Annapolis businessman named Larry Hogan, thinks the Washington Redskins, whose home games are played in Maryland, should proudly keep their odiously insensitive name. This stance struck me as a dog-bites-man bit of “news.”

So, anyway, would I like to live in a land where, in the short run, I could avoid the news media regularly uttering such obscenities as “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,” and where, in the long run, I perhaps could enjoy four well-defined climatic seasons for a few decades yet? Sure. But not enough to move to Canada. It seems like a lot of upheaval for some temporary gains.

Besides, there’s still the occasional pitcher of lemonade to be made out of the (oxygen-depleted) ocean of lemons that our future promises. I’m already savoring in anticipation a cool, refreshing glass of electoral turnabout in 2016, when the Republican Party will have to defend both its Senate-majority record and many more up-for-grabs seats than will the Democrats. And when Hillary Clinton just may become the nation’s first female president, to the GOP's apoplexy.