Okay, everyone. It’s time to chill out, stop the rhetoric, inhale, exhale. I propose that we imagine a different national political reality in the months ahead. It will not be easy because we are all riled up and in the midst of a COVID pandemic that is the single biggest challenge facing each of us, our nation, and our world in our lifetimes. But it is precisely because of that challenge that we must think and act together.

After reading the Nov. 12 attack-mode article by Carl Golden of Stockton University in New Jersey (entitled, “Pelosi among the election’s biggest losers”) in The Times Record, I made three promises to myself:

• I will not read articles that spend useless energy criticizing the elected leader of the United States Senate.
• I will also not read articles that spend useless energy criticizing the elected leader of the United States House of Representatives.
• I will embrace the President-elect and Vice President-elect and I will not spend useless energy on the about-to-depart President.

These four about-to-be new leaders of our country have close to 150 years of experience on behalf of their constituencies in Kentucky, California, Delaware and the nation. They are male, female, white, black, Asian, young, and old. Three of them have worked closely together for decades and are at the end of their public service careers with nothing much more to win or lose. All of them take on their leadership assignments with narrow and fragile majorities because America is so equally divided and in so many ways.

Of course, I realize that there are philosophical differences between Republicans who favor governments that provide only basic services and protection, and Democrats who imagine government as a force for social change. But I know there is middle ground in the areas of health care, immigration, education, trade, and protecting our planet. So my new logic, my fellow Mainers, is that there truly is no better time and arguably no better leadership team to target changes in that middle-ground space, and move us towards unity. But to give our leaders–all of them–permission to do just that, we have to lower the temperature back here. In fact, back home everywhere across America.

Electioneering will come again soon enough. So please, we the people, let’s not spend the limited energy we have in the midst of the pandemic and its accompanying economic stress treating each other with endless vilification. This is not what our founding fathers and the drafters of our Constitutions intended. They set-up systems, checks and balances to facilitate and protect the search for common ground. So please, we the people, let’s urge our elected leaders to work together to confront COVID; and from there to spend their time, energy, experience, and power debating the best ways to seek progress for the American people in those realms of policy in which we are not divided. In short, let’s urge them — no, let’s demand them — to govern! Because that’s what we elected them to do.

Nate Bowditch is the former commissioner of the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, former president of the Maine Development Foundation and former director of Planning and Community Development in Lewiston. He lives in Topsham.