apparently I’m better

Apparently I’m feeling better today, as there’s been raging political discourse in my house all morning and it doesn’t make me just want to cry. I’m just pissed off. Again. As has been usual when politics have arisen, the last four years. And I’m going to put the rest of my political commentary behind a cut tag for now, because the last few days have been exhausting and while I’m generally glad to expound endlessly on any topic, right now I’d like to give people the option to be spared the preaching. Especially since most of it’s to the choir. I don’t think I’ve got a lot of hardcore right wing readers. :)

*sigh* In other news, Ted got the Audi yesterday. It cost $425. They are fuckers. The Audi also did not *start* when he went to get it, so he had to come back and get jumper cables. Overall, it just sucks. All of it.

I FedEx’d this morning. They should get to NYC tomorrow afternoon.

miles to Lothlorien: 374.5

So this is what I have to say: to the best of my ability to tell, Bush won this round. He got elected by a majority. I believe he did it on an incumbency that wasn’t his, but frankly, there isn’t a goddamned thing to be done about that, and whether I like it or not, the people elected him president this time around.

I do not personally like that one bit at all. I understand there are at least 55 million people who disagree with me, and I think they’re all desperately wrong, but I’m unlikely to change their minds even if I talked to every one of them. As unlikely as they would be to change mine.

What I am still not certain of is what to do next. Ted is of the opinion that we need to wait and see; that we need to give Bush a chance to prove himself. I find no sense in that at all, as Bush has done not one single thing thus far that would prove himself to me as a competent leader for our country. I don’t see the point in giving someone who lied to the American people repeatedly a chance to convince me I should believe him this time around. This, to me, is rather the same attitude as, “He won’t hit me again.”

Someone on Salon said, “We now get to see if things get much, much worse before they get better, or if they get much much worse and stay that way.” Historically, the pendulum has swung back and things have gotten better. I personally have not lived through a presidency and administration that I think is as outright scary as this one is. This makes it hard for me to believe that the pendulum will swing back, despite historical evidence suggesting it will.

I’ve been threatening to leave the country if Bush won the election. Now that he’s won, I find I don’t really want to leave the country. It’s my goddamned country, too, and why should I walk out on it? (Look: I’ve got a little patriotic streak after all!) But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing.

Out of a hundred and ten million actual voters, half of them disagree with me violently. Extrapolating that to the rest of the country suggests that, hey, half the people in this country disagree with me to such a degree that we seem to have no common ground at all. Had Kerry won, it’d be that half which was extremely unhappy with the results of the election, and on the one hand, y’know, this is good: our society keeps functioning even when we’re split right down the goddamned middle on what the right way to run the country is.

On the other, I wonder if it’s even possible to find a country where everybody has the same general outlook that I do (or even a majority, instead of the Incredible Partisan Split that we’ve got going in the U.S. of A.), and if it is, if I’d be happier living there. I mean, I’d certainly be happier living in a country where the sight of my fearless leader didn’t make me want to either yell at the television or turn it off, but I would’ve gotten that if Kerry’d won. I would without question prefer to live in a country where I .can. make my choice and yell at the television if necessary, but part of my problem is that I’m genuinely afraid that in another four years I might see that choice taken away from me (Republican president. Republican Congress. I see an attack on the two term limit amendment coming.). And right now, I don’t know how to stop that from happening.

So anyway, today I’m less depressed and more angry, which seems to be going around. I still don’t know what to do. Well, other than run for political office, which…is perhaps a topic for another day.