The Moral Loss of a Country
By Sabrina Traynor
I wanted to take the time this week to just talk about what is going on with the election. I have found myself trying very hard to concentrate, get my work done, and do as much as I can and barely succeeding. Even tonight we do not have a definitive answer as to who is going to win, and I think I can speak for a lot of us when I say it is eating me alive. I really appreciated not having class yesterday in any of my courses, because I don't think I could have gone if I did. It is the waiting and the uncertainty that is killing me. I was watching the news last night and one of the anchors said that no matter what we had a "moral loss tonight," and I think that is really true. I think so many of us were not expecting it to be this close and even though we knew it would take awhile to know the results, we did not think it would come this close. This really struck me. A "moral" loss. Personally, I do believe we as a country had an extreme moral loss last night and this election should have been a landslide. However, it was not. We are not the moral people that I had hoped we all were. I did not want to get too personal on this journal, so that is as far as I'll go.
This brings me to the concept of morality and ethics. If everyone has a different concept of what is right and what is wrong, then does any "moral compass" truly exist? I think there is a majority consensus on what is right (do not murder, do not hurt, etc...), however, how is it that these so called wrong doings keep showing up in our society, and people get praised for them? Different people support them and egg them on and create entire groups out of them? I think we all have a concept of what is moral and what we should be doing, it is just a matter of who follows those morals and who does not.
Another thing I was thinking while watching the news last night watching the polls close as votes get counted, was the technology behind all of this and how they did it in the "old days." It is amazing what technology can do and have an influence on. Within minutes and sometimes even seconds it is displayed on a screen as to who one this state or that state, and the entire country (and world) can have a play by play of each step of the election. It is just fascinating how fast things move these days. it would be interesting to research just exactly how elections used to be help and votes counted and the accuracy differences from then to now. Anyways, this all kind of felt like a big ramble, but these were just a few thoughts I was having during this historical moment and thought they were worth writing down.