Frozen

I am so sad. And angry. And surprised. And embarrassed. And worried, so worried. My eyes sting from crying. My back aches from constantly watching TV and reading the internet and I want to be around others and I want to be alone and I want to talk to those who are as outraged as I am about the election results and I am also tired of talking to people who agree with me and I want to rush to a red state and just force them to see the world clearly! Yes, yes, how arrogant of me, right?

Also, I have a writing assignment and I have to write and I just want to turn the clock backwards and have it all happen the way it was supposed to happen! The way it should have happened!

These are the things I'm thinking about:

1.) People like me should not have moved away from the small towns we grew up in to big cities where our ideas are ghettoized. Washington State overall is liberal and democratic, but in Spokane, it's like Idaho. Very conservative. And yet, of course, I moved away. To be around other people who thought like I did. And so did millions of us. That's what people mostly do. And yet, it would probably be better for our country if we stayed in our small conservative hometowns and kept talking, talking talking. Teaching, reading, writing letters to the editor, etc. I mean, I know plenty of democrats in Spokane, outspoken democrats, but there's a lot of misinformation too. I just was in Spokane the weekend before last and I kept hearing over and over how Spokane was such a great place for kids to grow up. But is it a good place for a kid to grow up where morality is measured in religiosity? Which brings me to...

2.) morality vs. religiosity. It makes me so deeply sad and frightened that people in America think that being moral is being religious. My friend Jim Emerson said to me that he didn't think morality was even possible if you were religious. At first I scoffed at him, but now I think he's right. Religion requires submission to a higher authority and an abandonment of reason for faith. And that act in itself is immoral. Because morality is not about obedience but about looking clearly at the real hard facts and making choices that take those facts into acoount. To me, that is what morality is. And yet, most people who voted for Bush voted for him because of what they consider to be his higher values and morality. It's so simple minded, and it's such a blatant disregard for true deep morality. Morality isn't doing what you are told to do, being obedient and well behaved. Morality is acting in ways that benefit the common good after taking into consideration the facts. Morality is not allowing yourself to succumb to the wishes of big business or the government that supports it unless it can be demonstrated that it effects the good of everyone. That's what government is supposed to do. In a way, it's genius the way big business got the average american to believe that the moral choice was to go with them!

And I can't stop thinking about the Supreme Court. This may not be undone in my lifetime. I looked at Mulan sleeping this morning and wondered what kind of world she was going to live in. What kind of world we would both be living in.

I just want to look at the stars. I want to lay outside in the dark and look up at the stars and remember how small we are. How little and unimportant we are. Even though I know we are amazingly precious. And we may be squandering this accident of us, the wonderfulness of us to our deep irrational fears and excesses.

Today I drove behind a large black SUV with a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. It was like driving behind a wall of black steel. How cocky. How arrogant. And now they have the American people behind them. The Republicans have a blank check -- the House, the Senate. My word, they can do anything they want to. It can all change so quickly, our long fought democracy, our freedom of speech, our freedom of privacy, our freedom of worship. There's a tipping point where it could all be squandered very quickly.

This is the darkest day in American politics that I have ever known. As I walked on my hike this morning, I passed by people who were laughing and talking and I wondered how anyone could be laughing about anything? At least before the election the world didn't hate the American people because they knew that most of us didn't agree with George Bush or even like him or even vote for him. But now, all that is changed.

Oh dear, I think I'm going to cry again. DAMNIT. This is so bad. This is the worst possible scenario.