I am a direct product of my upbringing in Bisbee, Arizona, not only as a result of how my parents raised me, but also because of the quality of the teachers who taught in the local schools.

Today I’m thinking of one that I’ve never mentioned before, my eighth grade Civics teacher, Mrs. Hennessey.

Our class was tough on teachers.  Several of them died shortly after our class passed through, and Mrs. Hennessey was one of those.  She retired after our eighth grade graduation and died, as I recall, within a matter of months of retirement. But here’s why I’m thinking of her today.

The year I was in the eighth grade there was a particularly divisive election for student body officers at Greenway School.  I have no idea who won or lost, but I do remember there were a lot of hard feelings generated by the outcome of that election. In the midst of that, Mrs. Hennessey sat us down as a class and told us that we needed to learn to be good winners and good losers. (The idea of trophies for participation had not yet come into vogue.)

This country could use a bit of Mrs. Hennessey’s advice along about now. Maybe she could send it out in a tweet, because that’s what we’re seeing right now—bad winners and bad losers.

If you look at the votes, numerically things are about fifty/fifty, give or take a couple of million. So what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that the half of the country who happens to disagree with you is automatically, evil, stupid, racist, xenophobic or whatever. I’m sorry, calling your opponents names is so … well … junior highish! Hillary was right when she said, “We’re stronger together,” because we are! It was all of us pulling together who defeated Hitler and Japan.  

I try to keep politics out of my books because it’s clear to me that my readers come from both sides of the political divide. From a practical business point of view, it seems improbably stupid to offend either one. For one thing, I believe people read popular fiction as an escape from the real world, politics included.

If fiction is supposed to provide entertainment, news is supposed to provide just that—NEWS not diatribes.  And that brings me back to the teachings of yet another of my Bisbee teachers, Rachel Riggins, the long ago journalism teacher and newspaper advisor at Bisbee High School.  She made it clear that if we wanted to editorialize, we needed to write an editorial, and if we were reporting news, we needed to stick with the five W’s—who, what, where, when, and sometimes why.

I think many folks in the media, including the NFL, have lost sight of that. If you consistently trash one side or the other, guess what? People are going to start voting with their remotes.  They’ll stop watching. They’ll stop clicking on articles. They’ll stop visiting websites. And what will happen then? Advertising dollars will start drying up. It seems to me that disrespecting approximately half the people in the country is not a good way of doing business.

As you may have already deduced, I’m one of those dreaded Republicans—a deplorable as it were. But I’m also someone who burned a bra once (It was a nursing bra which I tossed on a barbecue grill after I cooked dinner which meant that, as a bra burning, it was pretty much a mixed message!) I’m also someone who walked ten miles for the equal rights amendment in Tucson in August on the occasion of Susan B. Anthony’s birthday.

Does my “outing” myself as an R. mean that some of my readers will immediately place me on their “I’ll never read another” lists?  Probably. By the way, those “Never read another” folks come from both sides of the aisle. Like the lady who stopped reading because Joanna and Butch released helium balloons at her parents’ funerals. Didn’t I understand how bad helium balloons are for the environment? (Never mind that these were entirely fictional balloons in an entirely fictional environment!) And then there was the guy who stopped reading my books because Ali Reynolds’s butler Leland Brooks was gay and I was “promoting the gay agenda.”

Let’s all just step back for a moment, and let this country settle in with its change in leadership. I don’t think things are going to be either as good or as bad as anyone is saying. Oh, and if you aren’t registered and didn’t vote, then sit down, shut up, and stop deriding the people who did.

Mrs. Hennessey never said that to our class back then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d stand up and say it now.

Somebody certainly needs to.