History will show the bronc stopped here

My life expectancy now hovers around 80. But I have yet another reason to live a lot longer.

I can’t wait to read the books that Pulitzer Prize-winning historians will one day write about the last six years.

Tuesday’s election results appeared to mark the end of this fascinating, terrifying era. At his press conference Wednesday, our Texas-bred president stood up to declare, “It was a thumpin’.” This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo, he added later. Nor was it ours.

George W. Bush’s entire tenure has been one long, reckless, bareback ride for us all. It’s been six years of anger and aggression, swagger and ego, and precious little explanation for how we came to be straddling this angry bronc in the first place.

Throughout these years, I’ve longed to fast-forward in time to read the histories I know will one day be written. In real time, it’s hard to make sense of the truth that underlies the headlines, the speeches and the photo ops. Eventually historians will decide what possessed a president to wage a war the rest of the world rejected and launch a fruitless search for weapons of destruction that smart people warned didn’t exist.

My best hope will be for the Echo Boom’s history majors to get cracking.

By sifting through the documents yet to be made public and conducting the interviews still unspoken, historians will finally be able to answer the question that’s been plaguing me these last six years: What the heck just happened here?

I’ve had a number of theories. Lately, I’ve closed in on a new one. It comes out of the field of neuroscience, and Daniel Goleman gives the basis for it in his new book “Social Intelligence” (Bantam).

Goleman describes recent research on a special kind of human brain cells called mirror neurons, which in uncanny ways help us understand the intentions and emotions of others. If we watch a politician pummel the air with his fist, the action activate the same circuits in our brains as if we’d made it ourselves.

Goleman calls this invisible connection a form of “neural wi-fi.” Like the network that allows travelers to use wireless laptops to check their e-mail in an airport, the mechanism apparently allows us to link up empathically with many others. It helps explain the notion of social contagion, in which attitudes such as ruthlessness and hostility can sweep a neighborhood or an entire nation.

Perhaps one day historians also will talk to social scientists who can help explain what just happened here. How, after the terror of 9/11, we somehow got our signals jammed. Many of us registered our president’s reassuring signs of confidence and determination and overlooked the underlying threats of unbridled American aggression.

Beginning in 2001, too many anxious Americans looked to leaders for cues. Last week’s election finally turned the mechanism back around. American voters became the senders, not the receivers, of the critical message of our time. The very next day, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense who had affected the persona of Hollywood’s World-War II-era generals, was gone.

We voters are frequently tempted to affect postures of our own: Cynicism’s the easy one. We can also turn to films for a cool, studied disdain.

But we can’t afford either. The decisions our leaders make are too important. In my quiet Spokane neighborhood, they transformed the boy trick-or-treating on my doorstep into a gunner riding an Army Stryker through Mosul. Politicians’ decisions determined whether he had the equipment he needed for battle and whether he could find college tuition and help for his nightmares when he returned. They affect whether a beloved neighbor can afford to stay in her home after retirement. They can affect whether our children will raise our grandchildren into a world of pleasure or misery.

This summer I gazed at photos of my paternal grandfather, both before and after he fought in World War I. The exuberance and optimism of the early photos had disappeared by the time the war ended, clouded under the dark shadows that remained in his eyes for the entire rest of his life.

These choices affect all of us, for generations to come.

In a democracy, we the people need to be sending the cues. Our leaders represent us. On Tuesday it was obvious: Americans, not political consultants, were transmitting the signals. Above all, this country must work to safeguard the well-being of ordinary families, not the power of a few. American voters need to convey that message with every neuron we can fire.