Whew. Another election is over. Everyone breathe.

As I write this, I have no idea how the election turned out. According to campaign signs and Facebook chat groups, our very existence depends upon the results. You choose one side and you’ve elected Benito Mussolini. Choose the other and you’ve got Leon Trotsky.

Neither is true.

It’s odd that when you meet the candidates one-on-one, they’re all smart. They’re all sincere about making things better. They all have good intentions.

There are differences in opinion about how to accomplish those things. There are differences in opinion about what’s right and what’s wrong, about what’s good and what’s bad.

During our most recent presidential election (and, sadly, ever since) Donald Trump was openly called an “existential threat to our democracy.” At the same time, we were told that electing Kamala Harris would “end our democracy as we know it.”

If those statements are true, our democracy has no chance.

Despondent, I turned to someone wiser than I for clarity.

“If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics,” Will Rogers wrote in an article over 100 years ago.

Sound familiar? The same could have been written yesterday and still be true.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Rogers was a performer, humorist and political satirist from the early 1900s until his death in a 1935 plane crash. He was immensely popular. The Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun is located on the side of Cheyenne Mountain and is the final resting place of Colorado Springs founding father Spencer Penrose and his equally notable wife, Julie.

Wisdom is often found in humor. Rogers was a master of both.

“There is only one redeeming thing about this whole election,” Rogers wrote in 1932 as Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the process of defeating Herbert Hoover. “It will be over at sundown, and let everybody pray that it’s not a tie, for we couldn’t go through with this thing again.

“And, when the votes are counted, let everybody, including the candidates, get into a good humor as quick as they got into a bad one. Both gangs have been bad sports, so see if at least one can’t redeem themselves by offering no alibis, but cooperate with the winner, for no matter which one it is the poor fellow is going to need it. So cheer up. Let’s all be friends again. One of the evils of democracy is you have to put up with the man you elect whether you want him or not. That’s why we call it democracy.”

Yes, please, let’s all be friends again. And to those who ascribe to one “threats to democracy” theory or the other, Rogers had a message for you.

“This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it,” he wrote. “That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.”