Our existential moment

This is it. Voting has started in Washington. People are taking heed and voting early. Great.

Whether you have voted or not, neither the day you cast your ballot, nor Election Day, Nov. 3, nor the day when results are announced in our Washington state or nationwide will be the most important day. Not the day the presidential winner is declared nor Inauguration Day January 20, 2021 will bring peace to our sadly divided nation or local communities. Like the end of the coronavirus pandemic, we do not know what national healing, recovery from the partisan pain and deep distrust of the other tribe looks like. We don’t have a cure and we don’t have a plan.

The one sure thing is there will be disagreement and blame of the other side.

As a society we are stuck.

And more, we are in an existential moment. Is the United States going to survive? Humans focus on individual deaths. Journalists and political types question if We, the People are so divided that we will fall to pieces.

What a four years it has been.

Most of the nation does not have the gumption for a civil war, but it is definitely true that everyone does not share the same reality. More than once this year phrases like “the next civil war” have been sounded by progressives and conservatives, alike.

Not having the same reality led the elite of South Carolina to pull their state out of the Union in December 1860, months before Lincoln’s March inauguration. Six states followed, all before Lincoln became president. Their imaginations and fears trumped reality.

In this existential moment will we take the time to assess not only our nation’s direction or even its future, but its very soul?

But who wants to do that? It will take cooperation, recognition of leadership, responsibility and follow through. It will take more time than we can imagine. It will take more work than we believe possible. It will take recognizing our role as part of the problem.

It will take a new normal. But getting to a new normal is impossible without agreement on the old one. And we do not agree. The simplest example?

One word: masks.

Courageous leadership and farsightedness would broach the topic of a post-Trumpian future. But the future is not about this man, even if another electoral college majority occurs. His failure of leadership stems from his incapacity to lead. Another victory defined by winning the electoral college will guarantee four more years of discord. Nothing will get done. The states will be dis-united.

If Biden wins a stunning majority and Trump goes silently into the night, the nation’s woes will not be solved. Whatever division or unity follows a Biden victory, whether it is of landslide proportions or a squeaker, a Biden presidency will not usher in peace or prosperity. Biden’s best efforts at healing will not heal divisions if all parties and peoples will not readily reach toward hands offered by the other side.

The healing will not come from the other Washington, way across the continent. Healing will not begin to start until each of us, ardent, good-hearted, pure patriots that each of us is, can figure out the wounds we carry that inflame us. These we need to name and ask for help in putting out and binding up. A healthy future starts by stopping blame of the other guy, the other side.

Existential moments are always personal, even when the nation’s soul is lost.

And if you have found, gathered and healed your soul, do you have the will to help others gather theirs?

There is a path to We, the People, but we have to insist on stumbling together on the route toward that possibility.