1,461 more days. 2.1 million more minutes. Four more years.
Come Nov. 8, 2016, America will vote for a president again. For some of us, the intervening time will be the best years of our lives. For some of us, we’ll want to hit the reset button and come back to Tuesday night.Of the five races I was watching, my candidate won in three and lost in two. I’d venture a guess that most of you reading this are in a similar boat. But my favorite part of the election isn’t the winning and losing, as much as my passion for statistics might suggest otherwise. No, my favorite part of the election is the moment at the end when both sides realize that they’re going to have to put aside their differences and work with each other throughout the next term.
To be sure, this doesn’t always happen. Attack ads against Richard Mourdock, who hoped to represent Indiana in the U.S. Senate, harped ruthlessly on a sound bite where he said “the highlight of politics is to inflict my opinion on someone else.”
Today, the election is over. Some of us won, some of us lost, some of us aren’t sure, and a lot of us will change our minds about these candidates in the weeks and months ahead. Today, we can put aside our differences. I won’t say it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a male or a female, a Mennonite or a non-Mennonite — each of us has our own identity that we hold near and dear to our hearts. But it doesn’t matter in the sense that together, we form one community, and regardless of how we vote or what we believe, we’ve still got to live together.
Every election map in the land is peppered with reds and blues and greens and yellows today. There’s nothing wrong with any of those colors (unless they’re all on the same weather map). But why should we limit ourselves to just those finger-paint colors? When the spectrum mixes, our color palette gets a whole lot more varied and way more useful. Let’s mix ourselves together and be the best palette we can be.
Also, if anyone’s Christmas shopping already, I really want CNN’s magic wall.