All over now, get used to it

It's all over now, and the collective sigh of disappointment of almost half the electorate is more poignant than usual, after what many of us believed was a truly crucial election.

I won't even try to express all the negative consequences of what I believe is America's WRONG WRONG WRONG choice, but there, right before WRONG WRONG WRONG, is the point... it is, clearly, America's choice. Bush won the popular vote quite decisively. The youth vote sat out the election, as usual. Those who disenfranchise themselves have no right to complain; this is the choice of the American people.

Many of us, myself included, feel that this Brave New Republic of which we are now citizens somehow isn't the Republic into which we were born. There was a switch onto very much the wrong track back there somewhere (more than one no doubt, but I'm talking about emotional response here, not critical policy analysis). Still, this is our country, and we (most of us) don't have any realistic choices but to make the best of our citizenship in it, and, most importantly, to work, however frustrating it is, however slowly, however much retrogression we face, to make this nation better to live in, and a better force in the world.

I intend to revert to groundhog mode for a while... I'm TIRED of politics. I hope those few readers of my little blog who may click into it going forward will find some of what I choose to post here interesting.

But I do not intend to give up on a citizen's duty, which I believe is increased in troubled times, to work for changes in policies he believes are harmful, and to try to ensure good governance, by whatever resources he can muster. Moveon.org, Howard Dean's Democracy for America, and other political action groups will have to be our guides to civic action, as we slowly build coalitions needed to take America back from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracay which has so thoroughly succeeded in seizing control of its governance. I refuse to believe that such action is futile, or that we won't eventually succeed in redirecting the country towards a more humane -- and sane -- policy overall.

On a side note, I'm leaving up the post about leaked exit polls from election day, as a signal warning against getting caught up in such unreliable information. It does no good to allow yourself to be buoyed by information that just isn't true, so when they say the information isn't reliable, it's best to just ignore it, for real.