Voting in the US presidential elections is a binary choice – one casts a ballot for x or y.
During US presidential campaigns – and especially during the now-concluding US election campaign – the candidates try to convince the voters that binary elections will produce binary outcomes. Either x wins and all is good, or y wins, and all turns to dirt. Either salvation or disaster, paradise or purgatory.While the choices are indeed binary, the significance of the outcome is seldom so. It is rarely the case in American history that the election of one candidate over the other has heralded an unmitigated age of disaster or, on the other side of the spectrum, a clear age of glory.As we all know, the simple truth is that reality is neither black nor white.That simple truth is something that millions of Americans who will be casting their ballots in a very consequential election on Tuesday would do well to keep in mind. Actually, they would do well to keep that in mind on Wednesday morning, after the ballots are counted, because then it will be important to realize that whatever the result, the American sky is not falling.At least not yet. At least not so quickly. At least not as a result of one election.
