Politicians, empires come and go; only love and nature will endure

Nature doesn’t care who wins the U.S. presidential election Tuesday.

No matter who wins, the sun will rise in the east Wednesday morning. It will sink gloriously to the west that evening.

The earth will keep spinning. Trees will keep growing. Leaves will keep changing in the autumn and returning in the spring. Torrents of water will keep falling from the sky and forming great rivers to rush toward the sea.

Animals will keep reproducing and living the lives they’re designed for. They’ll keep growing and changing and evolving. They’ll continue to roam the earth, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating.

Humanity will continue, too. The billions of people on this planet are the descendants of people who lived through far worse than what most of us will ever face — or can even imagine. The worst scenarios we can conceive would have been unimaginable fantasies of luxury to them.

Two people are competing Tuesday for a terrifying degree of control over this earth. They are both horribly flawed human beings — far worse than even the average among us. You can make arguments, if you’d like, about which of these terrible people is worse for the immediate future and why.

But it doesn’t matter.

First, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. One or the other of them will win and your thoughts, emotions and actions will not change anything about that.

Second, each is competing for power which is immoral for any human being to hold over another. Neither outcome is more moral than the other. No human has the right to control others against their will. Having a majority of people agree to violate the rights of any minority doesn’t somehow make such violations any more moral. We are all losers of every election, because most of us are buying into the monstrous notion that it is moral and acceptable for someone — anyone — to have this power if we happen to agree with him or her.

Third, the things that will determine your future — your love, your happiness, your fulfillment, your comfort — are mostly decided by the things you do with your own life, not by the actions of any politician.

What I’m saying goes against everything you’ve been taught. You’ve been told — at almost every election — that “this is the most important election of our lifetime.” You’ve been taught to worship a system of state power which is essentially a secular religion. You have been taught that every decent and responsible person must choose a side in an election in order to “support our democracy.” You’ve been taught there’s nothing more important than who holds power in the White House.

All of those things are lies.

The world has survived the birth and death of countless empires, most of which we don’t even remember today. Even the ones we do remember and celebrate are historical oddities, not things which matter to our daily lives. The Roman Empire — which started as the Roman Republic, remember — ruled most of the known world for far longer than the United States or other modern regimes have existed. None of the people living under those various emperors believed their empire would wither away. They believed their empire was unique — that it would always survive.

The people who lived in those places were just as varied as we are today. Some of them were great people. Some of them were evil. Most were varying shades in between. Same as today. Every single one of them is dead, no matter what he or she did to influence the direction of any government of that day.

The thing that mattered most while they lived is whether they were productive and how they related to the people around them — how they worked and how they loved. Same as today.

My future is determined by the things I do. I can’t change what politicians decide to steal from me. I can’t change the wars that people start because they are greedy or hateful or insane. As Pat Terry once wrote in the words of a song, “Nothing I say’s gonna change the way of this world.”

Nature is going to outlive all of us. Even if politicians are stupid enough to destroy humanity entirely before we can find a way to live on other planets, nature will still be here and it would recover without batting a metaphorical eye.

Mostly, though, love endures. In the here and now, the most important things I can do involve loving others and finding emotionally healthy love in return. Creating love and life somehow connects us to the Spirit I know as God. (You can argue about the nature and theology of God, but that’s not the point here.)

The God I know is the source of all love. He is the source of all life. When we love and create, we are most like Him — and I have faith that the love we experience and express somehow lasts far beyond the point when our feeble bodies return to dust.

If you have any sense of perspective — historical, spiritual, rational, any kind — you will begin to sense how little any election matters.

No matter what happens, the earth will keep spinning. The sun will keep rising and setting. Life will keep evolving.

And around the world, people just like you and me will continue living our lives, struggling to be better people, striving to achieve more and desperately seeking to be loved.

Nature endures. You and I will endure, too.

No matter what happens, you and I will keep walking on toward the future we’re personally creating for ourselves — through what we create and how we choose to love.