By Phil Blackwell
Sports Editor
When the election results became clear early on Wednesday morning, the epiphany arrived, too.
It was said months ago, by one-time “Daily Show” mastermind Jon Stewart, in the wake of the Republican Convention, a flash of righteous anger amid the usual one-liners that was brutally truthful then – and even more truthful now.
Quite often, the supporters of the guy who eventually won with the second-most popular votes talked about “taking their country back,” but Stewart was having none of that…well, nonsense is the G-rated term.
“This country isn’t yours,” he said. “There is no real America. You don’t own it. It never was (yours to own). You don’t own patriotism.”
Yet that’s exactly what you’ll hear, over and over, in the two months between now and the inauguration, some twisted idea that the United States was, for the last eight years, in “foreign” hands and that now it’s returned to some sort of greatness solely because some guy got more electoral votes.
Well, sorry pundits and partisans, but Stewart was right.
It’s not your country, it’s ours.
What does that mean? It means that, over the course of two-plus centuries, various groups had a role in building a great nation that stood as a beacon of hope and opportunity for people the world over. No single group did all the heavy lifting. Many participated – some willingly, some not (think slavery).
By doing so, they all gained a small piece of the American narrative. Eventually (though far too gradually), women, African-Americans, Latinos and other groups once held back by law and custom took their place among the framers and pioneers, providing inspiration to generations of Americans that followed.
That didn’t come without a battle. From the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement to women’s rights and LGBT rights, there was always a group standing in the way, inevitably proposing that these new tides of history threatened the “American way of life” or, translated, their right to hog all the power and influence, especially in politics.
Those resentments would not go away when things got a bit more equal. They festered throughout most of the 20th century and deep into the 21st, feelings of abandonment that may have been rooted in the loss of economic pull, but masked uglier traits like racism, sexism and homophobia.
We thought we were well past hearing those diatribes and putdowns, at least in terms of settling national elections, but what happened in 2016 was that the mask got ripped off, and our divisions were laid bare again, exacerbated by a close election with a split decision similar to 2000.
Flaws of both major candidates were poked at, but as is typical in a society where females face far more hurdles on their way to the top, trivial concerns and small-time scandals were blown up to crisis proportions on the woman’s part, while rampant bad behavior by the man got papered over through a full year of free air time before anyone bothered to look closely at his long and sordid record.
Combine all that with a perfectly timed FBI letter of inquiry about emails that hogged most of the campaign homestretch, and well, you see the result, one that many of you love and many of you hate, but we all have to accept.
It doesn’t have to be dark, though, as long as we remember the basic notion that no group, and certainly no man, has a monopoly on national pride, and that it’s in every single one of our best interests to have a collective desire to make things better.
Again, it’s not your country, it’s ours.
Here’s a way to know that the protest, in the form of a vote, is sincere. Will the same citizens that railed for eight years at anything and everything our current president tried to do show that same vigilance toward the new guy in the White House?
If you truly love your country as much as you say you do, then you hold your leaders responsible all the time, not just when you feel like it or when it lines up to your points of view. Otherwise, it’s transparent hypocrisy, willing to jump on the sins of one man and totally forgive the sins of the other.
At the same time, those who despair over this election’s outcome by withdrawing into a shell, or threatening to move to another country, only will make things worse. If you love America, the best thing to do is to stay here and fight for all that you believe in, wherever you can. They can’t silence you forever.
Without question, millions of Americans now feel vulnerable and scared. It’s up to us, whatever our points of view, to let them know that Jon Stewart’s words still carry weight, that no matter who occupies that desk in the Oval Office, they, too, are important and powerful, and if they can join forces, they can make sure this already-great country can be made greater when all of its people get involved to accomplish that task.
But it has to be done together, with people thinking beyond their own selfish interests to act toward a common goal.
It’s not your country, it’s ours. As long as we remember that, no one can bring it down.
