...
Are flowing steadily today. First I finished up on the firemen's 9/11 documentary, which had me blubbering, and now this. I am crying for my country.
I harked back to the last couple of weeks before the 2000 election, suddenly overcome with a certitude that one must NOT vote for the one with whom at least it would be fun to drink a beer.
Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, OJ, Waco, the despicable steaming pile of a universal healthcare plan The Gorgon had dished, the rightful rabies on the right over her body count — the horrific shit from the 90s — it all welled up out of the oblivion of having a life, like cosmos was trying to say something to me.
I had not given a fig for which of the two would be elected... just about neck and neck for sheer ludicrosity in my book, though Gore might've been a jot less embarrassing.
I could not bring it to the front of my mind, but my guts were boxing around in there to the point where I called every last one of my almost solidly liberal friends and made them promise not to vote for Dubby by voting for Nader.
They'd needed an explanation. I couldn't explain further than just suddenly I was ajump with a cosmic sense of doom if he won. We'd all voted for Gore, when most of us had decided not to stoop to it.
And Gore actually won, except the Supremes handed it to Dubby despite all my fretting and fuming and certainty this meant something much worse than the usual mildly unendurable nastiness from Republicans. No! I was beside myself.
By September, I'd almost convinced myself I'd been in that panic for no good reason... that maybe it had been my nerves giving out on me again... that it had not been the buddhas of the ten directions trying to tell me something. I'd made such a hairy fuss over maybe nothing.
That's when the 11th woke me to run over to the neighbor's house and turn on the tv.
It had not been over nothing. It had been over this.
That's when I started working harder to understand things from the point of view of all my redneck friends, the guys with the I'M WITH YOU, RUSH stickers on their trucks, the guys I loved just as much as any of my very oldest liberal friends.
And that's why Dawn and I were blubbering over the certitude that Donald is our ONLY chance right there in the middle of my haircut the other day. That he is LITERALLY risking life and limb every single day and he's our very last chance.
pipe up any time....
