We’re boned.
Kerry concedes. Hmm. This is better than dragging it out like in 2000, but this is not good in the big picture at all. I might have to change my tongue-in-cheek tag like “tracking the inevitable technocracy” to “tracking the inevitable civil war.” Still tongue-in-cheek, mind you. But I’ve never felt this nation so divided so firmly before, and over such unconstitutional ideas such as religious morality in government. It’s really frightening.
New York politics happily held up as expected, but it’s hard to watch the rest of the country go so awry. It makes me uneasy that a pivotal issue was terrorism, yet people removed from the daily issues these policies create have the sway to influence the places that actually carry the burden of being the high-risk targets — D.C., New York and even Pennsylvania all went to Kerry, and these were the places the planes crashed. Can this be only coincidence?
Say what you want about “flip-flopping” (I loathe that term), but at least Kerry has the wisdom to learn from past mistakes. Bush only has the arrogance to keep making the same ones. Kerry would have seen this victory as a new challenge to bring this country back together. Bush—the man who originally campaigned as a “uniter, not a divider”—sees it as a validation of his one-sided agenda. “America has spoken.” he says…well, only one-half of America has spoken for you.
I’ll point you to this commentary that I spotted browsing through del.icio.us. I couldn’t agree more with the author’s bullet-points.
I’m reminded of an article that ran in Rolling Stone recently—one reporter went undercover in the Bush campaign and came to an interesting conclusion about the religious political supporters in his camp: these were people who seemed to define their beliefs through conflict. They were actively looking for tests-of-faith in politics because their perseverance through the challenges defined their faith further. Perhaps they thought that God was watching, and that since they were putting up the “good fight” (i.e. Crusade) that they would receive His blessings… Bah! There’s so much wrong about this when it comes to the original American democracy that I can only agree with one student that was exit polled, who said that America has peaked as a culture, and is on the down-slope no matter what.
Our nation fought a war of independence to establish our government as an umbrella that all religious societies could prosper and build communities under, and from the 20th century through today we’ve lived through the culmination of the blurring and damaging of those ideals into the modern Right view that a specific morality should be legislated and enforced on its people.
Way to go, America.
