Richard Nixon gives his victory wave after his landslide win against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Nixon’s 1972 re-election was as painful to Democrats then as the Nov. 3 blue tsunami is to Republicans today. The 1972 election was the last time a Republican presidential nominee carried Minnesota.

“With malice toward none, with charity toward all . . .,” as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, you, who recently voted for Midterm Election candidates endorsed by America’s ringmaster, because, perhaps, like him, you too became so infatuated with our post-World War II past that it caused you to fear our present and future so much that you balled your hands into fists, until the ringmaster’s divisive rhetoric found a frosty place in your heart that warmed to his malevolent, xenophobic, pay-to-play, three-ring circus governance, and your heart’s door swung wide open to his gilded self-aggrandizement, you can stop crying now.

After all, historically, y’all are hardly the first voters, who, after winning control of all three branches of our federal government, allowed your elected leaders to get so drunk on their newfound power and their leader’s ravenous, sophomoric taste for retribution, they, just two years later, lost both houses of Congress because they got so far out over their skis that they “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Not that you will find it any consolation or keep you from reaching for more Kleenex at the moment, but I too have slouched over a beer or two and watered them with my tears when, in some elections since I became old enough to vote, candidates and causes I voted for lost, and, in some cases, lost bigtime.

Regardless, please, buck up enough to imagine my chagrin when I woke up one frost-on-the-pumpkin morning in 1972 and felt knocked out by the news that “Tricky Dick” Nixon, in a landslide, beat Senator George McGovern in that year’s Presidential Election.

My friends and I slouched into our cemetery-quiet student center and pulled up chairs around a round table where we usually sat to sip coffee and smoke cigarettes before power walking off to a philosophy class we had together.

My usually glib, gregarious, “knights of the round table” and I were shattered, totally at a loss for words. Our ordinarily bright, smiling faces were dark, dour and deep plowed with frowns.

After many, long minutes of silence we stopped trying to stare holes into our ashtrays and coffee cups.

Finally, someone in our gaggle glanced around at the rest of us, caught our watery eyes, and blurted out, “How could McGovern have lost . . . lost so badly like that? I mean everybody we knew voted for him!”

Through the decades since then I and most of my friends came to realize that succeeding, whether in politics or in so much else in life, requires more than preaching to one’s choir about its virtues and how its hymns were superior to those of other choirs.

We, through “the school of hard knocks” learned that, particularly in politics, success requires more bridge building than barricade building between us and folks who we, in our heart of hearts, know are more like us than unlike us except for the philosophical ground they stood on and how they thought we should go about solving our mutual problems.

Conversely, you, who are dancing in the streets today, celebrating all the “walk off” winning, “inside the park” homerun elections your team’s candidates won, should not forget, as you party on like it’s New Year’s Eve and congratulate each other with hugs, high fives and pitchers of beer and/or other beverages, you might find it wise to take a cue from the gist of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

Why?

Because the next election cycle will roll around before you know it. Then, if the winds shift back to the tornado-like ones of the last two years and, “TKO-ed” by your own hubris, “unforced errors,” and, perhaps, failure to deliver on your promises, you might find yourself dining on the crow your competitors, much to their chagrin, are eating today.

Yes, even though “joy tears” are rolling down your cheeks now, you too, like those who cast votes for their candidates rather than yours, can stop crying now.

Remember, we’re all still adults, we are all still living in the USA! U . . . S . . . A! So we, in time, after celebrating life’s highwater marks like birthdays, graduations, and weddings, we dry our eyes the way most grownups do.

We do this because we know that it’s the best way to soldier on in life. We stop crying when we want to keep crying because we know it’s the only way to soldier on in life. We blink back our tears because we know that in our dreams, shattered or realized, begin our responsibilities.      

So, if you are toasting your Homeric Midterm wins, you might stop popping the champagne for a second, just long enough, to have a slice of humble pie.

Likewise, in the days ahead, as your party’s politicians begin to walk, to run in the shoes they were elected to wear, you might remember to keep practicing the keystone thing you preached at your rallies and in your commercials, the thing you promised America that your party would govern with, the thing that keeps Lady Liberty’s lamp lit: empathy.

Of course, since I’m an old salt, who spends more time beached before his TV than walking beaches, making beachheads or navigating inland toward W.H. Auden’s “Atlantis,” what do I know?

I know Frost was right when, musing about life, he observed that regardless what happens in life, “Life goes on.”

I know why people, especially ancient mariners like me, like to give advice. In the words of Buddha (or was it Yogi Berra?) who explained it this way, “Giving advice is like kissing – it’s pleasurable and everyone feels qualified to do.”

WDSE-FM “The North” and WOJB-FM air William Tecku’s reflections on the human condition. To read and listen to William Tecku’s reflections visit “Reflections by W.T.” on Substack.