Competitions, elections, rituals, traditions

A big election Tuesday: will the Democrats regain control of the House? If they can't win in the present environment, what's it take for them to win?


A more interesting question to me is this: are we red states and blues -- or the United States, as claimed by Barack Obama in his rousing speech at the DNC a couple years ago? I've been watching political divisions for over half a century but I'm not sure I've ever seen so little healing and reunification "as Americans" as now. I think one of the things we've lost are the rituals that permit this, that remind us that what we have in common is greater than our differences. Or is this no longer true?


I was reminded of such rituals a week ago when I stumbled upon the closing moments of the Air Force - Army football game. It was not a competitive game. Yet at the end, I witnessed something you rarely see today. Both teams lined up on the Army side of the field for the singing of Army's alma mater. Then both teams crossed the field to sing the other alma mater in front of Air Force fans, the winners getting to sing last.

This seems like a small insignificant moment. I would have thought so when I was younger. But now it seems to me to be just the sort of thing the country needs, a ritual, an institutionalized gesture that follows competition with reunification, that reminds us that larger issues and values are at stake than winning or losing.

In a brief moment after 9/11, I felt this energy in the country again. America felt like one country. The feeling didn't last long.

It's easy to dismiss rituals and traditions when you're young. They seem rather silly. But when you get a larger perspective, when you've lived long enough to see the repetition that inevitably happens in social and political life, new generations doing old things but claiming they're new (out of ignorance), you begin to understand the fragility of the social contract and how it needs all the glue and stickum we can muster to hold it together. Rituals and traditions serve this purpose.

At the end of my email signature is this quotation from Chesterton:

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

-- G. K. Chesterton