If politics is a game – and that’s how the media mostly reports it – then last Tuesday was a whoopin’ for my team. (But, hey, I’m used to it: my high school football team was 1-6, and before the season we thought we might go undefeated. Then we actually had to play someone.) All the post-election post-mortems, the gloating and whining, the excuses and accusations, can’t obscure a simple fact: we lost. It happens. But what if politics is more than a game? What if you believe that some issues are too important to simply say, “well, we lost that one.”

Only days before the election, the UN published its most dire warning ever on climate change. Don’t tell James Inhofe, the next chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Citing “the nation’s top climate scientists” – not one of whom actually agrees with him – he calls global warming "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.” On issue after issue – from infrastructure investment to reproductive choice, from urban revitalization to wilderness protection, from universal health care to universal suffrage – I see a Congressional majority completely out of step with me.

Well, tough luck for me. I don’t get to choose a benevolent despot to give me the government I want. That’s why we have elections. And we'll have more. I may have been 1-6 in high school, but I’m not leaving this field just yet.