Coup

I've been watching political drama tonight, but it's not the election, it's The West Wing; not only that, but I'm about to start the last episode of the fourth season, one of my favorite episodes of the entire series.

I've taken a break from watching though to hit refresh on the CNN home page and to attempt to write down something I have been thinking about today. I'm not really worried about who wins tonight; I certainly disagree with one of the candidates on some issues that are important to me (so I voted for the other one), but I believe that God has a plan for whoever he has chosen to put in office-elect tonight. So the thought that has kept coming back to my mind today isn't who is going to win, but rather something that I heard, or read, or saw somewhere sometime that I can't quite remember exactly. I'm leaning toward it being from a movie or a TV series, and it's a story told by a guy about the time he took his kids (or his father took him?) to stand outside the White House on election night so he could talk to them about how the most powerful man in the land was on that night going to watch someone else be named to his office and do nothing to stop it. A coup was taking place at the highest levels of government, and they were perfectly safe to stand on the street where it was happening because not a single shot would be fired.

Tonight, dozens of the most powerful officers across the land will simply be replaced, and in the midst of this massive governmental upheaval the biggest problem most citizens are worried about is whether or not it will start raining before their part of the line gets inside the polling place. We have a system that works, and, despite its problems, works better than any other system in the world. That's something to appreciate and be grateful for, no matter which candidate wins.