I came straight home from teaching Tuesday afternoon to get everything in order for the election results that would be flashing across my computer in just a matter of hours. I had specially designed an election page on CNN.com to give me detailed results for the races I had a particular interest in, as well as general results for all the races. I had my score sheets made out for the U.S. Senate races, the House races, and the Governor races and had my blue and red pens at the ready to fill in the declared winners. I've been a political junkie since I worked in my first campaign for a Congressman running for Governor in Arkansas when I was 18 years old. To political junkies like me, election night is the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Final Four and the Kentucky Derby all rolled into one. It's that single, redeeming value and reward for living in a democracy; the right of the people to decide whether to stay the course or change directions. I subscribe to Rasmussen Reports and Pollster.com so I already knew that change was in the air but I'm not sure anyone knew that things were going to change as much as they did.

 

All of the polls predicted the Democrats regaining control of the House of Representatives but few, if any, predicted a majority in the Senate as well but, of course, that's what happened. The truly amazing thing about this election was that it was not a "throw the rascals out" election. It was instead, "throw a certain kind of rascal out". And that rascal this year was anyone who had an "R" following his or her name on the ballot. This was not an election that rejected incumbency in general but rather Republican incumbency. Not a single incumbent Democrat was defeated on Tuesday, either running for re-election for the House of Representatives or the United States Senate. Thirty states were electing U.S. Senators. Twenty-three of them elected Democrats, including six seats previously held by Republicans. 232 Democrats were elected to the House of Representatives, compared to 203 Republicans. Of that number, not a single incumbent Democrat lost while they were capturing 28 GOP held seats.  Prior to the election, Republicans headed 28 state houses. After the election, 28 of the 50 governors were Democrats.

 

This was a very similar rejection of the status quo that occurred in reverse during the 1994 mid-term elections. Sometimes political observers wonder why the people "just don't get it" and then the people remind the pundits that they do. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is an adage we have all heard. In fact, I addressed this in a column I wrote a few weeks ago about gridlock. When one group of people has ALL the power, it doesn't matter who they are, they become non-responsive to the rest of the people. Republicans, Democrats, Baptists, Catholics, gun-control opponents, gun-control proponents, pro-life, pro-choice; the list could go on forever.

 

That's why our forefathers established a system of checks and balances. When one group gets to write a blank check and the other group doesn't have enough power to reject it, why should the dominant group ever listen to the submissive group? The answer is, they don't, until they're made to.

 

This concept of absolute power doesn't exist only in the political world. It exists everywhere. The Democrats, by retaking Congress, now have the power to push the President more towards the center, more towards compromise, more towards where most of us are already. The same kind of absolute power exists in houses and homes, in boardrooms and office complexes, in schools and classrooms, and everywhere else people interact with each other. And when that power is absolute, it is also corrupt. The other person doesn't have a say. They have no input. Their opinion and advice is neither asked for nor desired. And because their perspectives are ignored, they are ignored as well.

 

Maybe all of us can learn a little from Tuesday's election. Maybe we can say to those people controlling and dominating our lives that enough is enough, just like Americans all across the country said to the Republican ruling class on Tuesday. We said to them that we had given them the benefit of the doubt; we had stayed with them even when things weren't going well because we believed they still had our best interests at heart, and we stayed with them because leaving them would be admitting that we were wrong in the first place.

 

But leave them is exactly what we finally had to do when it became clear the only interests they had at heart were their own. We divorced those interests on Tuesday to give another suitor a chance. Perhaps we won't like this one any better but at least now they'll have an opportunity to either prove or disprove to us that they deserved a chance.

 

What a different world it would be if we could all do that on smaller, much more personal levels. If more of us could say to those people in our lives who are controlling us and dominating us that enough is enough and we're going to change course too. We're not going to put up with this kind of treatment forever because we don't have to. We have hopes and dreams and plans and schemes and they're just as important to us as yours are to you. But we want to achieve ours in a spirit of joy and happiness and hope and optimism, rather than forcing ourselves on people weaker than us simply because we can.

 

If we could learn a lesson from the choices we made on Election Day, and apply those lessons to our own individual lives, we could change the world, one person at a time.