Going sane in the Ukraine
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For results from our past election, we have on one side an embarrassing petulance and questionable insistence --- a myth, really --- that the nation is deeply and gravely divided.
On the other, a mandate is claimed based on rather narrowly defined moral values, capitalizing in part on responses to Election Day exit polls. This despite a Pew Research Center study that points up a possible skew in the polling process.
For a sane perspective, we fade from the United States and bring the lights up on the Ukraine. We have been seeing and hearing a lot about the election in the Ukraine, and we should explain that first.
Some thought the Soviet establishment crumbled decisively 15 years ago under the weight of popular uprisings fueled by intellectuals like Vaclav Havel, statesmen like Boris Yeltsin and moral leaders like Pope John Paul II. But some old Soviet habits may have survived, such as rigging elections per orders from Moscow.
The recent presidential election in the Ukraine has been declared fraudulent by that country's parliament. Although exit polls there showed opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko leading by more than 10 percent, the election commission, allegedly at the direction of the Kremlin, declared Moscow's candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, as the winner.
The streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, instantly filled with protesters, sealing off the presidential palace. Although the protesters numbered more than 100,000, they were well organized, almost uniformly peaceful and even --- dare we say it? --- moral, agreeing to a strict no-alcohol rule.
Eastern Europeans do not seem hesitant to consider morality in politics as two sides of one coin. It was there that church leaders brought pressure to destroy communism from its foundation.
In the Ukraine today, the struggle against the old Soviet-style authoritarianism has raised religious involvement to a new level. Two leading denominations that have long opposed each other, the Russian and Ukrainian orthodox churches, have joined forces to support the protesters because, as one spokesman put it, "our future" is at stake.
There, in the Ukraine, morality and politics meet, and do not merely glance off each other, as we make them do here.
Here we suspect morality as a Puritanical bogeyman that somehow poisons the electoral process, or hold it at arm's length as a cipher that, ironically, limits us from making moral judgments.
In the Ukraine it is a major reason why they have lived in sub-freezing temperatures on the streets to demand fairness and honesty. The priests of the two orthodox churches make appearances to bless the protesters, who, in turn, desire that connection to the moral absolute.
Back in America, fresh from an election once characterized as the most important of our generation, we hear either unadvisable gloating over victory or old-fashioned sour-grapes regard for the voters or the electoral process. That, and we manufacture reasons for indignation, imagining divisions to be deeper than they are. They are hardly the deepest we have seen in history, or even in the past 30 years.
Up next to the courage and vision of the voters in the Ukraine, our post-election behaviors ring as hollow as any lack of conviction can.
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