During the past 45 minutes or so I have sat back and listened to the conversations around me. They have been a mixture of gloom and doom and elation. I am not feeling particularly happy or sad. As I have said many times before I didn’t like either candidate.
And this distaste led me to a place in which I am rather ambivalent. I don’t think that the country would have collapsed under a Kerry administration any more than I think it will under Bush. The energy or lack of energy around me is significant, which is why I am commenting on this again.
I’d really like to see an effort to bridge the gap and move forward. You can’t spend all day waiting for the sky to fall. For those people who have invested so much energy into praying that Bush would win I suggest that you find a new positive way to harness that energy. Be productive, there is always hope for a better tomorrow.
It will be interesting to see how the next four years pan out.
I know, I know. I almost went on about that earlier. Lots of people like me like to give lots of lip service to our liberal values. But do we do anything practical to promote change? Very few, I’d wager, actually do. I certainly could spare a couple of hours a week of my time to volunteer for an organization that works to further causes I believe in. Just need to pick one and jump in.
There are two ways to go about this, one is to mope and the other is to be an active participant in fighting to see that your voice is heard.
I’m not speaking for anyone but myself here, but it’s not a feeling that the sky is falling, or that the country is going to curl up and die because Bush won. Kerry wasn’t my first choice of a candidate. I voted for Edwards in the primary. But to tell you the truth, it wasn’t really about the candidate for me. It was about the party, and the philosophies that those parties represent. People may say that they are the same, but I don’t believe so. To me, the one is about property, and the other about people. The one seems more concerned with denying people civil rights than with protecting their civil rights. The one panders to those who would push their religious beliefs on everyone else. The other recognizes the importance of the separation of church and state. And it is disappointing to me to see where the soul of this country is apparently headed. I was hopeful there, for a little while, that there might be a change coming. But there is not. At least not yet. That is what my moping is about, my listening to 1930’s blues today, and my wanting to get drunk and chainsmoke two packs of cigarettes. Sigh.