Published: November 20, 2008 05:07 pm            

Election: A healing process must begin

It was surprising that several states regarded as poor, including our own West Virginia, voted for the Republican candidate and not the Democratic. Considering how little McCain offered us by way of fixing our national ills, I do not know why West Virginia and those other states went red. I was happy to see Virginia went blue.

From the start of this presidential campaign, John McCain was hard-pressed to offer viable solutions that would help the middle class.

Knowing the history of the Republican party, voters should have realized his prime loyalty would be to corporate heads and not to a suffering middle class. This has been traditionally true with the exception perhaps of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

I hope the voters who went with McCain did so out of a personal conviction that he was the better choice and not because he would be the conduit through which Sarah Palin could become president.

Furthermore, I hope they did not choose McCain because his opponent was black. Sadly that seems to me a strong possibility, especially in the southern states where people cannot forget the American Civil War and that whole travesty of justice and Christian charity called slavery.

I believe it is to the credit of our nation that an African American will occupy the White House, an event that neither Dr. Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy dared dream.

It is my belief that both parties in the next four to eight years must work hard to redefine themselves for the good of the entire nation. The Republicans need to move left, closer to the center; the Democrats need to move closer to the right.

The Republicans need to be more diligent in watching corporate America with a wary eye. The Democrats need to be less liberal in their stand on abortion and homosexual marriage. And we may see the formation of a major third party to appease more of those in the middle who claim they voted for the less of two evils or opted not to vote at all.

With the election over, the ubiquitous political ads finally fading from our TV screens, we begin again a healing process so we may once again be citizens of the United States of America.

Salvatore Buttaci

Princeton, W.Va.

        

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