Now we all must stay active together

How's your transition going?

For more than 58 million people, the results of the presidential election were disappointing. For the most conservative true believers, the results were nearly Armageddon. Many of them still are flooding public forums, calling President-elect Barack Obama a socialist, a Muslim terrorist or worse. The liberal true believers should be able to relate to how the other side feels. Really. Take a moment and think about this: That is very much like how many of them felt when they woke up that morning after and realized George W. Bush likely was going to be our president after that Florida election mess. Remember that?

But this is 2008, soon to be 2009 and it's all over. Now we face our future.

Truly, now is the time when all good women and men must come to the aid of their country and their local communities. Now is the time when we all must learn to get along. We must heal. We must learn to disagree agreeably; to debate and respect each other and the diversity of our viewpoints without getting personal or even violent. Most of all, we must continue the activism we showed when many more of us voted Nov. 4. We must commit ourselves to watching our governments with a critical eye. We must work to demand accountability and change. We must understand that all of us love our country and want to see it flourish. As our great democracy models for all the world the proper way to transition from one leader to another, from one party to another, so must each one of us.

GOP nominee John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama led by excellent example with their wise words on election night. "Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long," Obama said. McCain's words were perhaps more significant. "I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him," the Republican said of Obama, "but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity..."

Here is the best way we know to do just that. End the name calling and the fear mongering across the political spectrum. Start watching, listening, reading and thinking critically about what all our governments are doing _ from the federal level down to the local ones.

Do you know if your local officials are cutting enough or trimming the right things? Do you know if our state officials are working overtime, as many of us are, to try to balance that budget?

Here's one more suggestion for where we all might join together and start. CBS' national news is saying it called the nine big banks that already had received billions from the credit bailout to ask what exactly was being done with that money. Banking officials said there was nothing in the bailout law that required them to tell us what they're doing with our taxpayer dollars. Are you satisfied with that? Then, let's all work together to demand it be changed.