When I was young, they told us that America was a melting pot, a country that accepted everyone who wanted to live with us, and that sooner or later the newcomers would share our love for a country that was prosperous, positive, with opportunities for all. The lines written by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, display the same sentiment.

“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Now that the votes are all tallied, it seems clear, that America is a deeply divided melting pot. It hasn’t been a civilized election. It was the six-shooter and the tomahawk all over again, insult, kill and take scalps. Somebody’s got to win and somebody’s got to lose. It was all teams and the colored uniforms. It has mostly been about the reds and the blues that makes it a “them versus us,” rather than “what’s best for me, and what’s best for my country.”

The electronic media have put us all in red or blue uniforms.

Charlie Brown, the Charles Schultz comic book character, said it as well as anyone could: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Our fascination with major league sports and their use of colored team uniforms sets the style for our politics.

Colored uniforms for sports teams help us chew over which players to root for, and what groups to despise. But when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down (or severely limited) public attendance at the major league games, we lost a great outlet for expressing our fears and anxieties, anger and payback, and left us nothing to chew on but one another.

The electronic media have done a great job helping us follow the voting and the ballot counting here in the melting pot, but their use of colors for the political parties is misleading, and throws us right back into the chanting mode of “root, root, root for the home team” and ignore the values and principles offered by the individual candidates.

Color block decisions in the electoral process make it hard to choose between the values, standards, principles and plans offered by the individual candidates. Nobody likes bad values, low standards, weird principles and crazy plans, but if you elect them, you’ve got to live with them, and not with their colored uniforms.

That’s what the electronic media have been doing. Blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans encourages the kind of colored block thinking that paints all people red or yellow, white or brown, or black. Perhaps, if we could start thinking of all the political candidates as all the same color, elections would go more smoothly. Well, actually, they are all the same color, they are all human color.

Orrin Frink is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at ofrink@gmail.com.

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