We stood at Armageddon and we could not find the Lord.
Five percent of the United States of America did not vote for Mr. Trump or Secretary Clinton. We are neither devastated that Clinton lost (oh blessed thought!) or thrilled that Trump won (the Republic lives!). Generally, we are the sort that put no trust in princes, refuse the lesser of two evils, and lose a great deal in this life hoping to win in the life to come.
Maybe.
This is the generous view of our natures. We might also be the sort still worried about the library book we “stole” in 1972 from the Penfield Public Library. There it sat, unknown, until one day we picked it up and realized: “We now owe more on this book than we are worth.” Sometimes at night, we wake up and think: “She knows. That librarian always knew when I checked out the Tin Tin books that I wanted them.”
You can be sure that we are not sure we did the right thing voting for McMullin, Johnson, or Stein. How could we be? We knew what we did not want, but we still cannot consistently spell McMullin, are not sure Johnson is sentient, and worry that Stein might be from an alternative reality. We tried to do no harm, but don’t know if we did any good.
How can you talk to us when the conversation turns, as turn surely it must, to the election? We face corresponding temptations and so in the interest of convivial bliss here are some tips:
The safest thing to say this year is: What hard choices we had this year!
This is safe, because there has yet to be a single year where the vast majority of Americans did not think the choices sorry. After all, we have always been a big nation and with rare exceptions it is hard to imagine that the two we get were the Ideal. A large number of your guests did not vote at all and of those that did vote, rarely will anyone have fallen in love with their candidate. If a person in 1856 thought Fremont, Buchanan, or Fillmore best suited to govern us, he later invested in Confederate bonds. If you lost a friend over his voting for James Cox over Warren Harding, you made a mistake and he got rid of a bad friend.
If you think that either Trump or Clinton was the obvious best choice, recall that you might be right, but the vast majority of voters disagreed.
It is too late to get our vote and it is too late for us to persuade you not to vote for Trump or Clinton.
Perhaps we should have jumped on the Trump Train or Been With Her, but we didn’t and weren’t, so quit. They claimed we had a binary choice and we said choose “no.” If that was wrong, then do a Frozen and let it go.
Yet every day something will happen in the news that stirs the third party voters’ outrage. By Thanksgiving, we can (unless we are careful) spend all of dinner rehearsing what WikiLeaks revealed about Clinton and what Trump hath wrought. “I tried to tell you,” is not persuasive months before the man has even been inaugurated.
Don’t agree to disagree aggressively (he says to himself)
My wife reminds me that dinner is not Twitter. The desire to have the last word at dinner and then cap it with “let’s agree to disagree” is irritating. It’s like the guy who wins a hand in poker and at that very moment notices the time and has to leave. It is not fair to say: “I guess the unborn were less important to you than your conscience.” or “Fascism in America doesn’t bother you as much as it does some of us.” and then immediately say, “But I guess we will have to agree to disagree.”
This is fine in social media where nobody ever gets the last word, but cruel to your Third Party Friend. Recall: we are less likely to grab the electric knife, than to add whatever you have claimed to our guilt list. We are (so we are told!) very conscientious.
Of course, never-Trump/Clinton folk face this temptation daily. No matter what happens, we can intone: “I told you not to vote for Trump.” or “You had to vote for Clinton.” We then can look at the ground, shaking our heads at the folly of those who lacked the wisdom to lose badly.
This is an unpardonable dinner sin. We promise not to commit it if you will not assume that we don’t care about life, liberty, or your happiness.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking “winning” or “losing” proves your point and force us into a painfully painful pained look.
We get it: if you were for Trump, you won! We rejoice with you. If you were for Clinton, you lost! We mourn with you. Why? The Bible commands that we rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Mostly, we third party types are less concerned about winning or losing in the short term and more about ideas. This may have been a mistake, but triumph does not impress us or defeat do much to discourage us.
We often take this to extremes. Some of us still toast at Pascha: “Next year in Constantinople.” This is . . . unlikely for 2017.
Just as you cannot convince a Brown’s fan that his quarterback situation will always be bad, so you cannot convince us to give up on our conservatism, libertarianism, or whatever it is that Jill Stein voters believed. We did not think we would win . . . the point was greater than winning.
On the other hand, we recognize that the pained looked that we sometimes get, something like constipation mixed with exaltation, when we are “explaining” our vote can be quite annoying. Particularly appalling is when we develop the beatific heavenward gaze of Joan at the stake as we explain our vote for Evan. We are trying to stop this habit, help us by leading us not into temptation.
We can do this dinner. In fact, the jollification will be great. We, the third party voters of America, promise to recall we might have blown it if you will recall the same.
And after all, weren’t the choices horrible?
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