The Fluttering Wings of our Better Nature

So now it's over. The contest (also read "slug/slime/mud-fest") that began in Iowa and New Hampshire in the depths of winter has now reached its denouement in the brilliant colors of autumn. The election returns are in. What now? Statistically, there are more delighted voters this morning than in 2004, when the President won reelection with 50.7% of the popular vote; and certainly more than in 2000 when a President was elected with only 47.87% of the popular vote. President-elect Obama's apparent 6% margin of victory in the popular vote, while certainly no landslide, suggests, if nothing else, that our nation's intransigent division is – at least for the moment – thawing.

So, again, what now? How might we seize this moment? Will we rediscover a different way of talking with and about each other that is less demeaning, less pejorative, less dismissive? Will we dredge open again long-silted channels of communication that reverence the intrinsic value of each other? Or will we continue to simply talk at each other – retreating and descending still further into our bunkers of political and intellectual isolation where words are less instruments of communication than incendiary explosives that we lob across the aisle without regard for where they land; where "dialogue" is little more than alternating monologues designed to overwhelm rather than understand or persuade; where "debate" is less about the victory of our ideas than about the mockery of our opponents?

I am tired of hearing us belittle each other. I am weary of assuming the worst about each other. I am exhausted by all the innuendos and melodramatic pronouncements about why we should be afraid of each other. Surely there is some alternative between naiveté and paranoia. Surely I am not the only one who is worn out by all this attention to each other's flaws and the determination to grind them brutally, laughingly, publicly under our heel.

Perhaps that is an unrealistic hope, but I want to believe that we are better than we have been behaving. Abraham Lincoln, on the occasion of his first inauguration, referred to the "better angels of our nature." I hope this morning finds us stopping long enough, listening carefully enough, to hear the quiet flutter of just such angelic wings. The demonic side of our nature has enjoyed free play long enough.