Stay!

A few bits of political venting and catharsis have come to my attention that I'd like to pass on:

http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

http://www.apologiesaccepted.com/index.html

Tim Bedore's "New America" commentary

There's been a lot of talk in the past couple of weeks about leaving the country, on the grounds that Bush's America is just going to get worse over the next four years - more civil rights violations, more anti-intellectual attitudes, more overturning of science in favor of corporate greed or thinly-disguised religion, more deaths in Iraq and elsewhere, more people around the world hating the U.S. and all they think it stands for. So how, exactly, does leaving the country help? Better to stay here, and do our best to counter ignorance with knowledge and reason, and remind the country about all the things pretty much all of us believe in, that got buried and ignored in favor of slogans and the politics of fear.

My dad said, "Kerry saw the complexity of the issues, and tried to explain them to the people. Bush engaged in sloganeering. The sloganeering won. If you repeat a lie often enough [e.g. Kerry the flip-flopper, Kerry the traitor, Kerry the anti-military], people start to believe it." Yup.

I don't know what's going to happen in the next four years, but I know we can get through it. This country has been through much worse, from the Civil War to Vietnam. Maybe by 2006, people will be so fed up with Republican excesses that there will be a backlash in Congressional midterm elections. Maybe by 2008, a Democratic candidate for President will emerge who can outshine and outlast a McCain or a Powell or whoever. Maybe along the way, we can convince people that gay people are no threat to the institution of marriage, that the separation of church and state is not an assault on anyone's personal beliefs, and that Judy Blume and Madeleine L'Engle and Mark Twain belong in school libraries. I think that's a future worth staying around for, and working for.  If we don't work for it, who will?

Karen