If you lose, you lose –

But if you lose well, you win. Oh, yeah, yeah – I know there are conservative talk show hosts who would roll their eyes at such a goody-goody assertion (maybe only Mr. L) but, you know – I don’t really care.

I’ve never been much for competition. Okay, it fires you up to do better, and that’s swell. But winning has never been that important to me. Maybe because I haven’t done it that much. And you’re wondering if I have a point? Well, I’m thinking about the people who are hollaring, “He’s not MY president.” But I’m also thinking about the swarms of nasty little poor sports dancing around LDS church buildings in the last several days.

Here’s the deal—we may be a republic, but we’re all about making our decisions together. We all have a vote; sad that even at our best we’re lucky to get maybe 60% of eligible adults out to vote. Republicans may be whining about their loss, but then, fewer of them showed up to vote this year than in 2004.  And when you vote, somebody wins and somebody loses.  Boo-hoo.

In other countries, when you lose, you shoot people.  Hmmm.  Now there’s a grown-up attitude.  In this one, when you lose, the answer is to work harder—you work on the grassroots level, you put your power where your mouth is—persuading not intimidating.  But the whole point of this is that when our system works, everybody wins—everybody sleeps safe in her bed at night, the children can walk to school in the morning without fear of assault, and people treat each other with their usual (sigh) civility.  That’s the way a family, a community, a civilization has to work in order to survive.  I mean, short of something like the Ming Dynasty.

So to all the losers out there – and I’m one of them: suck it up, watch your mouths, behave with grace and get off your back-ends.  We should all be making sure that Mr. O, no matter how we may feel about his views, gets safely into office, that when The People speak, as happened in California, we realize that we actually have heard the voice of the people (like, nobody escorted each voter to the polls on threat of dismemberment) – and that maybe we are – shock – a vast minority.  And maybe there’s even a good reason why we are, regardless of the passion we may honestly feel otherwise.  We don’t always get what we want, and – in fact – when you live in a majority rules world, it’s a flat out guarantee that there is going to be a segment of the country that does NOT, in fact, get what they want, part of business as usual.

Doesn’t mean you can’t change things.  But it does mean that if you want what you want, you’re going to have to win another way, and intimidation and bad losing and whining never did win the heart or mind of your opponent.  Gosh, could there be another way of doing it?

We can all learn from each other.  We can get healthier as a group.  We can all pull in the traces together.  We can all work harder, show up to vote, decide to save money, cut up our credit cards, lose weight, learn how to use technology – get a life, in other words – and channel the energy we’ve put into whining into something that moves us forward, something that might define our lives more deeply and significantly than political party or sexual practice.

I’m probably just thinking about this because I’ve got to clean the kitchen.  Hey – where did all my kids go?