Joseph Sabino Mistick: Now it's time to come back together

Gloating is not our most attractive trait, but it is a natural human response. Republicans gloated plenty in 2016 when Donald Trump beat odds-on favorite Hillary Clinton for president. They kept it up for four years, celebrating Trump’s moves more if they aggravated Democrats more.

And now Joe Biden has beaten Trump, and it is the Democrats’ turn to gloat. Trump started riling them years before he became president with his baseless “birther” campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency, and he kept piling on. So they danced in the streets when the news broke that he lost.

We could go on like this, taking turns switching the party and person in the White House and gloating over the other side’s defeat. This time, Biden racked up more votes for president than any other candidate in American history, some 78 million by the end of last week. That sounds like a mandate.

But Trump received the second most votes in history, over 72 million. And he did it during an unbridled pandemic on his watch that has killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans so far. Since all those Americans voted for him anyway, we all need to give that some thought.

Everyone knows people on the other side. They are family members, friends and colleagues. We used to have dinner together or grab a beer or stop to chat and catch up on the kids. Our politics ended a lot of that, even before the coronavirus made us more careful. But now we need to start having American conversations again.

We don’t need kumbaya fireside talks in which we forget about what has passed. That’s not possible or even something we want to do. We all have someone who we are happy to finally have out of our lives, and that doesn’t have to change. But we still have to solve those problems that are hurting both sides.

All Americans are entitled to proper health care. Every working family knows that you don’t quit a job until you have a new job, and health insurance should be that way, too. Ending Obamacare before a new program is in place is plain stupid, and those empty promises of a better plan fool no one.

An infrastructure plan has been “coming” for four years, but it has never arrived. It is an easy lift, creating good paying jobs while improving our crumbling roads and sewers and bridges. And it is the best investment of our tax dollars, since the wages and salaries and profits generate more taxes, and the work refunds itself.

And since we really are a nation of immigrants, we must find an orderly path to citizenship without cruelty and meanness. No real American supports stripping children from their parents at our border, then losing track of those parents and making those children orphans. The dark spirit that allowed that to happen has permeated the system, and it has to stop.

We don’t have to like each other or start hanging out again. But we really do have to work together for the good of us all.