Editorial: After Voting, Take the Next Step and Hope

News flash: elections are tough on people. … Because I’m sure this is the first time you’ve heard that. But what if I told you voting is only the first step?

Inevitably, tensions are high as elections come and go and even small towns divide themselves into herds right and left. Anxiety is at its peak on election night when Americans vote and then collectively hold their breaths.

It was in this moment of high tension just before results started coming in that the unformed version of an editorial popped into my head. With one day every four years causing so much division and anxiety in this country, there had to be a takeaway, a next step.

A few days later, I started to form what the next three steps were for me. Maybe they will help you as well: keep thinking, do the work, and choose to hope.

Keep Thinking

First, it is pivotal in those hours following an election to keep thinking. In hindsight, I see this step in my searching for a takeaway. Elections tend to wake up our brains and even make us open to moving things around as we grapple with new realities. They get everyone active and thinking. At least they do for me. Don’t let that go away.

With all the new information election results bring, some political ideas will solidify, while others will shift. As new information always does, the election might cause people to rewrite their personal brand of patriotism, much as I did after hearing immigrants talk about the Constitution. 

Being an American is not voting and then waiting another four years for our brains to turn back on. Being an American is having the freedom to think for ourselves.

Do the Work

Thinking naturally leads to the next step: doing the work. Sharon McMahon celebrates this. She has received nationwide media attention after her book, The Small and the Mighty, became a #1 New York Times best seller in September. Later, her TED talk showed up on YouTube on election day.

“If you want to know what great Americans have in common,” said the former high school law and government teacher, “it is that they have worked in their own way, in their own sphere of influence in their homes and their schools and their houses of worship — they have worked in the government, they have worked at their businesses — to make America four things: just, peaceful, good, and free.”

Being an American is not sitting back and waiting for institutional change to be thrust upon the country. Being an American is having the freedom to work for the changes we want. Sharon came up with many examples of people who thought like this throughout American history in her book. 

I can think of a few myself, including many in our communities. Don’t shout political opinions from the rooftops and then climb back into your holes. Do the work.

Choosing to Hope

The final step, after thinking and working, is choosing to hope. This may be the step America is in most dire need of.

Hope floods many people’s minds with historical and religious examples. They may think of George Washington and the soldiers fighting in the American Revolution. And veterans of any battle that we now honor for Veterans Day. What were they living for but hope? Maybe they think of one of the Latter-day Saint prophets in the Book of Mormon, named Mormon, who wrote about hope when his people were killing each other at war.

But hope is even more unifying than that.

Hope is all over in media and literature. In the fictional Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen becomes the symbol of hope, which the tyrannical dystopian leader first encourages before mistakenly letting it get out of his control. “Hope, it is the only thing stronger than fear,” he said. It ended up being his downfall.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” reads a well-known Emily Dickinson poem, “that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

Hope is the idea that led Dr. Greg Hudnall to create a squad of students to help identify suicide warning signs in peers. In psychology, Charles R. Snyder’s Hope Theory suggests a strong connection between hope (a positive emotion) and achieving goals.

Being an American is choosing to hope.

So I hope when Americans are done making enemies over a faraway election, that they can come back and do the thinking, working, and hoping it takes to make things better at home.

You voted. Now take the next step.

– by Abbie Call

---