We went to bed at 10:00 last night, long before the final states were called by the networks. Fascinatingly difficult night, that.
My folks moved to Wales this year. Just before they left, my dad called and told me that if Bush won a second term, they weren’t coming back. Yeah, yeah, he was joking, but this morning, I had this waiting for me in my inbox:
My sincere condolences on the loss of your country for another four years. As we seek asylum here in Europe, we want you to know we’ll be in constant touch. Should you be driven from your home by fundamentalist Christians under the rule of “Bush” for watching “The Simpsons” or some other violation against the State, you’ll be able to reach us immediately, and we will try to get to you and save you.
We’re both involved today in an emergency underground here in the UK. We were simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. We have good, intelligent leaders who we believe will offer us the best resistance to the American sprawl should they venture to this island in the North Atlantic.
Until we meet again. Our love to little Sophie. Tell her we’ll send for her as soon as things cool down.
Dad
It’s starting to remind me of the hit series “V,” or, you know, the Holocaust. (Here, I’ll be busted for likening our current political situation to war crimes and other atrocities, but I can’t help but feeling this eerie parallel between the early popularity of Hitler’s propaganda with the German conservative right and the blood red that covered the electoral map last night. If Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, N. Korea et al have taught us anything, it’s that regimes must all start somewhere.)
Then, I picked this up on boingboing.net:
Kerry concedes.
Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who’s spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.“Get over it,” he said, “The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term — crushed. I just couldn’t believe America was that stupid. “But remember what happened to Nixon that term.”
“Change comes from discontent,” he said. “And right now, there’s a lot of discontent.”
I love Xeni Jardin (cat’s out of the bag. BFD). She goes on with that post, but I think the opener really sums it up. I look around me at all the people who are in my life: bright, witty people grounded in honesty and integrity. These are people for whom moral values mean more than electability. They’re vibrant people, concerned about the direction we’re headed and longing for something different. How is it that this sentiment, which is so rooted in reality for me and those around me, is such a farce for more than half of our country?
As a marketer, I handle Canada as part of my territory. I spoke to a friend of mine at Channel M — Multivision Television this morning who asked if I was wearing a black armband today. He said that Canadians are stunned. He asked how we could put a party in office that’s so full of shit. I wonder.
It’s funny. I was so confident that we were going to take this one that I’m not sure I did enough on my own. I wrote a bit about it, but since I haven’t worked toward any real readership here, I can’t claim to any wild success in the PR arena. I leave that to friends like Curt and Kath. I feel changed now, though. The lines, the hours that people waited to cast their votes, and the passion with which people fought for this one showed that voting is no longer enough.
It takes talking about the issues by the water cooler, not hiding in the corner and whispering. It takes publicly denouncing false promises and bad policies as cancerous, not relying on the vocal minority to do the talking for us. There is no general public. They do not exist. This game takes practice, and this party just wasn’t ready for it.