I thought about not writing my feelings about this election. My views are either shared by you (making my mutterings nothing new), or you will completely attack every sentence I put down as some crazy liberal ranting. But then I realized that there was too much going on in my head to ignore. It’s my journal afterall.
For most of the day yesterday I was in shock. I really should have expected this Bush victory, but I couldn’t bring myself to fully accept it, and when it happened I was left feeling… well, this article, shown to me by says it well:
…well, simply staggering. Mind blowing. Odd. Gut wrenching. Colon knotting. Eyeball gouging. And so on… You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you’re an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don’t normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex…
(I thought it was worth reading the whole article, if only to fume and say “yes, exactly!” at the end.)
So I was upset yesterday, then got drunk last night. I went to bed hoping that I’d wake up and it would have all been a nightmare. Instead I woke up with a hangover, it was raining, and I had to go to work.
I did some thinking. Maybe I should move to Canada, get a hunting shack, hunt moose and brew beer? Nah, moose are too cute to eat.
The conservatives I’ve talked to since Bush’s victory tell me that they’re sick of us complaining about the loss, claiming that they wouldn’t be so bitter and sore if their side had lost. It might be true, but in my case this loss was more than just the loss of some presidential canidate, it’s the scary direction that our country is going in, and will continue to go in.
Recently Bush said something like “We don’t want courts to decide, we want the American people to decide,” which was followed by loud cheers. That sort of talk is terrifying! There is a reason for the courts, so that things are fair, even if a majority of eligible voters think that slavery is good, women shouldn’t vote, and gays shouldn’t marry, the courts can say “No” (eventually).[1]
Our White House is full of war monger neo-conservatives who think that it’s best for the country to run up the deficit, alienate our allies, illegally invade countries, legislate our bedrooms, and interfere with the progression medical science.
And they seem to have this assumption that we will always be a Super Power. We won’t. I think we’re making a mistake letting our power hunger get the better of us, and that’s not going to be good down the road.
I think our founding fathers would be ashamed.
I’m also frustrated because I wanted to think better of the American public. I chat with a bunch of anti-american Swedes, and from time to time I’ll try to interject comments about how not all of us are bad. In one fateful conversation I even claimed that there was no way that Bush could be re-elected, because the American people now know that they were lied to, we’re not THAT stupid. HAHAHAHA! I WAS WAY WRONG!
Anyway, this will be my last politicalpost for a while. I’m too tired.
[1] EDIT: I thought about this paragraph after posting, and I realized that the message was unclear, and made it sound like the courts step in an decide everything in a timely manner and that they did in these cases. The point I was actually trying to make was that our country was often quite divided over issues in the past, issues we take for granted as going one way or the other. The court system is in place to decide if something is constitutional or not, so that even if a majority of the country thinks that, say, Protestantism should be the national religion, the court can say “HAHA NO WAY.”
