(no subject)
It was at least a week after the first tuesday in November of 2000 that I was cc'd on a mass email from a middle-school friend that I had not talked to in six years. I've lost the email but I've thought about it over the past eight years. In more or less words, the friend, a classmate from the baptist middle school that I attended for two years, explained to me that we(America) were at the dawn of a new day. On that day, the day that George Bush Jr. was elected president, the tides of America were turning, he prospected. It would be the beginning of an American presidency in which pride and Christian values would return after eight years of disappointment and embarrassment.
I was living in Oklahoma and I was eighteen years old. I did not vote, but I was happy that Bush had won. I was in Oklahoma. I was eighteen years old. And though I did a muted "cha-ching" fist pump in the dish-pit of the kitchen I worked at when I the news broke, I did not connect to the victory the way my friend from seventh grade did. He wanted it; his excitement was palpable. It spanned years of incommunicado and found me: mildly involved.
Eight years later: a new election. I've come to know elections as diagnostic tests for determining how disconnected I've become from the mainstream heartbeat of American opinions. The logical, rational choices(my choices) had been consistently contradicted for so long that I had lost any ability to predict a winner. When I woke up today, I wondered if this day would be another patriotic groundhog day. Would Americans emerge from their burrows, see their collective shadows, their fear, and their apprehension and scurry back into their holes? Four more years of winter? It could happen. Of course it could happened because it happened four years prior. How could it have happened? It was bad then and it is bad now. There are differences, but the choices are the same: fear or change.
I wondered this morning whether or not I would, again, find myself on the edge of America looking in at something that I can't relate to. I was prepared for it. I had a callus.
Things are different now. The day is over. Things have changed.
I hesitate to congratulate America on such intelligent decisions. I will never understand their decisions. However, it certainly does seem as though progression has finally burst. It would certainly seem that the last eight years were a drought of responsible leadership caused by a few fingers plugging holes in a giant dam.
I don't know where my friend from seventh grade is or how he feels about the past eight years including tonight. I don't know if he is cc'ing his accumulated friends from his life and preparing an inversely optimistic(is this optimism?) message. It's important to go out on a limb and not worry about being foolish sometimes, but it seems like a bad idea. I want to say that today is the beginning of a new era of democracy in America when responsibility and honesty will return to the presidency. It certainly does feel like that, though. It feels good. It feels hopeful.
I was living in Oklahoma and I was eighteen years old. I did not vote, but I was happy that Bush had won. I was in Oklahoma. I was eighteen years old. And though I did a muted "cha-ching" fist pump in the dish-pit of the kitchen I worked at when I the news broke, I did not connect to the victory the way my friend from seventh grade did. He wanted it; his excitement was palpable. It spanned years of incommunicado and found me: mildly involved.
Eight years later: a new election. I've come to know elections as diagnostic tests for determining how disconnected I've become from the mainstream heartbeat of American opinions. The logical, rational choices(my choices) had been consistently contradicted for so long that I had lost any ability to predict a winner. When I woke up today, I wondered if this day would be another patriotic groundhog day. Would Americans emerge from their burrows, see their collective shadows, their fear, and their apprehension and scurry back into their holes? Four more years of winter? It could happen. Of course it could happened because it happened four years prior. How could it have happened? It was bad then and it is bad now. There are differences, but the choices are the same: fear or change.
I wondered this morning whether or not I would, again, find myself on the edge of America looking in at something that I can't relate to. I was prepared for it. I had a callus.
Things are different now. The day is over. Things have changed.
I hesitate to congratulate America on such intelligent decisions. I will never understand their decisions. However, it certainly does seem as though progression has finally burst. It would certainly seem that the last eight years were a drought of responsible leadership caused by a few fingers plugging holes in a giant dam.
I don't know where my friend from seventh grade is or how he feels about the past eight years including tonight. I don't know if he is cc'ing his accumulated friends from his life and preparing an inversely optimistic(is this optimism?) message. It's important to go out on a limb and not worry about being foolish sometimes, but it seems like a bad idea. I want to say that today is the beginning of a new era of democracy in America when responsibility and honesty will return to the presidency. It certainly does feel like that, though. It feels good. It feels hopeful.