There was a bit of drama for television viewers as the tally board behind Wolf Blitzer and the Talking Torsos added up the results of the electronic voting. Then, with the drop of the gavel at the announcement of the result, there was more scripted scuffling as the opposition attempted to raise various objections to the process and the result. But with the exception of a couple of parliamentary aftershocks, it was over. After many failures, and just about one hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt proposed, during his unsuccessful run for a third term as President, a sweeping health care proposal, Congress had finally passed one.

Never mind that at the moment it looks and smells a lot like sausage, thanks to all the competing interests that had to be satisfied; never mind that nobody you know has read the whole thing or can speak with authority about what its consequences will be; never mind predictions that Armageddon is upon us and (as 24% of American Republicans responded in a recent poll) that President Obama may be the Antichrist; and never mind Senator McCain’s bizarre comment that Democrats could no longer expect cooperation from Republicans. If the law doesn’t work, and if the predictions of its critics begin to look valid, there’s no law says we can’t change or repeal it.

Have we forgotten that Americans once fought like cats and dogs over the manufacture, sale, and consumption of “intoxicating liquors,” and that senators fearful of losing their seats to temperance candidates passed the Volstead Act over the veto of President Wilson? Subsequent ratification by the states amended the Constitution to make Prohibition the law of the land. It didn’t work – was, in fact, counterproductive – and so was repealed. That’s the beauty of our democracy when it works: We can revise, improve upon, or discard what doesn’t work for us.

That thought doesn’t cut any ice with people who, like me, know only what they’ve read about the new health care insurance law, but are instead adamantly opposed to it. There’s been considerable flailing about and shouting, and too many people in positions of leadership seem to have forgotten the need to speak responsibly in public, no matter how upset or elated they may be. We should all remember the hateful full-page newspaper ads that Dallas businessmen paid for in the days before President Kennedy’s last visit there. Many folks, stronger in impulse than intellect, have felt themselves encouraged to rise up in anger and frustrate the government juggernaut (good luck with that!) however they can. You can’t help but wonder what Sarah Palin’s utterly irresponsible ads, which superpose the crosshairs of gunsights on the names of congressmen who voted for reform, suggest to these credulous characters.

An elderly Rapturite, who claims to expect to be raised into the sky at any moment, frequently posts comments on my Facebook page. Today she wrote, “O is a muslim who hates Israel and the Jews.” It’s a very old (and bad) debater’s stunt: If you can’t come up with a coherent argument, attack the person, The hate mail, the bricks through windows, and the coffin left cowardly on a congressmen’s lawn are reminiscent of both the purge and murder of Loyalists during the American Revolution and the ominous foreshadowing of [ital] Kristallnacht [ital] in 1938.

And yet I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that it’ll blow over before long. First of all, as any news writer can tell you, Americans’ attention spans are notoriously short, and baseball season is almost upon us. Also, when, as the President suggested recently, we look around a few months from now and realize that the sky hasn’t fallen, as Congressman Boehner has predicted it will, we may begin to look a bit more rationally at what’s been accomplished, what’s changed, and what it’s costing. The tea in the Tea Party pot may not grow cold – there’s still immigration reform, for example, to heat it up – but we may at last begin to realize what other developed nations have known for decades: that it makes economic and moral sense to protect the health of all your citizens.

Meanwhile, I’m sure Gore voters remember how outraged they were when the Supreme Court awarded the 2000 election to George W. Bush. According to a study conducted just after that election and cited in the March 23 issue of [ital] The New Yorker, [ital] Bush voters were only one-third as happy as they had expected to be, and Gore voters only one-fourth as disappointed. It appears that neither winning nor losing had made as much of an impression on either group as both had anticipated it would.

I find the vituperation, hyperbole, and personal abuse prevalent in the arguments of citizens of a democracy preferable by far to the muttering and suffering of oppressed people in countries like China, Cuba, Burma, and Iran. But in the end we have to recognize that in a democracy we’re all supposed to be in the boat together, and we can’t row if we’re fighting all the time. Let’s hope the nation can get over the conflict, see what this new law really does (as opposed to what we’ve been told it will do), and work with it less as opponents than as shipmates.