I do this strictly as an exercise in survival.

Like the majority of people who voted in the presidential election, I chose Al Gore. But, like the vice president himself and the 50 million-plus other folks who pulled, punched and penciled for Gore, I got screwed. And there's not a thing any of us can do to reverse that.

(Hold it, hold it, you rarin'-to-be-rowdy Republicans. Heed the words of Jim Nicholson, your own national party chairman. Earlier this week, he told Ted Koppel on "Nightline": "No one should gloat.")

When a human being gets screwed and can't change it, just about every immediate instinct is to lash out and do some serious damage -- preferably to the people who did the dirty deed. Fortunately, it isn't possible to track down all the deserving bad guys and gals in this national debacle, let alone personally smash every one of them square in the middle of their smug, pasty face.

I say "fortunately" because who wants to spend the rest of her or his life in prison for punching out the likes of Katherine Harris or Jim Baker?

Thwarted from immediate gratification, the next set of human instincts is to plot some kind of future revenge, something less primitive than nose- pounding but ultimately hurtful -- or at least annoying. Again, the sheer number of perps in this situation makes even delayed relief essentially impossible. Besides, is life really long enough to spend years of it standing outside Antonin Scalia's house screaming, "Shame! Shame! Shame!"?

So then what? You've got 50 million of us, all dressed up in rage with no place to go. Not in the market for an ulcer, a stroke or some stress-induced immune disorder, I choose to short-circuit the anger, take some deep breaths and start searching for those aforementioned shards.

So far, I've found a couple:

Maybe the most positive, potentially great one directly involves Al Gore. In a way that almost no white man of privilege ever experiences in this country, Gore now knows what it looks, feels and smells like to get utterly and irrevocably screwed.

Like Ebeneezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol," and Mortimer and Oliver in "Trading Places," the vice president has been given a tremendous opportunity by the fates to see way beyond the range of his own low-powered telescope.

In his I'll-fight-for-you convention speech, and in the last weeks of his campaign, he spoke often and passionately (for him, anyway) about the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized and minorities. Now he knows, firsthand, a tad about what these millions of Americans are really up against. Every day they run smack into the patently unfair. The unmerciful abuse of power is the only kind of power they ever see. The one deck they're allowed to play with is unmistakably stacked.

If Gore acts constructively on this revelation, as Scrooge did, he cannot help but become a true champion for the genuinely dissed of society. If he follows the greedy, selfish route of Mortimer and Oliver, he and the people he purports to care about will be bigger losers than he could ever imagine.

The second useful piece of wreckage has to do with the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite its overtly partisan (and clumsy) 5-to-4 ruling, it still represents what it was designed to represent: the ultimate authority of law. But any pretense of the court being an ultimate moral authority -- or even an oracle of wisdom -- is kaput.

There is no such human entity and never has been. Not here or in any nation.

The sooner we all accept that reality, the closer we'll be to behaving like adults and working to fashion the only code of morality and wisdom that is of use: our very own.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

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