It's like, this whole time, through this whole campaign season, the narrative has been one of hyper-partisan bickering and issues not being addressed and the end of democracy as we know it.
And yet instead of buying into that, apparently the citizens of this country were busy moving their lives into the 21st century. Honesty, reason, and facts trumped greed and cynicism last night. I was ecstatic when President Obama was re-elected. I was utterly stunned at how beautifully progressive many of the rest of the night's triumphs were. I remain speechless at how these victories prove that the people of this country still have the power, regardless of the forces out there trying to block our votes and/or buy them away from us.
Oh, I know...I'll go back to being critical and angry soon enough (that's where the fun of having a say in your government comes from, after all). But today, I'm choosing to be shamelessly optimistic.
Yes we can, America. Yes. We. Can.
:)
I am shocked by this election's outcome. Shocked. And stunned. But in a very good way! ;-)
ReplyDeleteWell done America!
ReplyDeletecongrats :)
ReplyDeleteHey Becky!
ReplyDeleteYaaaay for Barack!!! I too am very elated that he won this second election! But just one question, and sorry to burst your balloon, but, how much does it bug you that nearly half of your country would support that other guy? And I'm not even going to enumerate all of his and his party's shortcomings/major defects IMO.
I'm VERY HAPPY that BO won, but I find it depressing and disheartening that the GOP / Tea Party / Fundamentalists / call-them-what-you-will / have such a large support. What the hell???
Jane!!! It’s been forever!! :D
DeleteYou’re not bursting my balloon at all; this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the course of this entire campaign, and am still thinking about!
I don’t think any one thing can be to blame. There are people who just very genuinely don’t believe in Obama’s politics, and I respect those people’s right to their opinions. But aside from intellectual differences, there are some other reasons which are more disheartening…
One is racism. It does still exist in this country and I’m embarrassed to say that I was horrified but not surprised that there were students at the University of Mississippi who burned Obama campaign signs on election night.
But more so even than that, there’s the problem with information. With the internet, Fox News, and talk radio, there is a subset of the American population who only gets their news from inside a bubble. I have good friends – people who are otherwise nice and rational and intelligent! – who live inside this bubble and literally do not understand that they are living in a bubble.
The problem with the bubble is that there is so much CRAP being said in it, that people start to believe things that aren’t true, and when you hear what they’re being told, you start to understand why they would be scared of Obama.
They actually think he’s trying to “ruin America” (or something). They actually think healthcare reform is evil because we have the “best” healthcare system in the world. (It takes two seconds to Google statistics on that and find how untrue that is, but why would you do your own research when all of your newspapers and TV anchors are telling you otherwise?!) They actually think that raising taxes a tiny bit on wealthy Americans will tank the economy, and they actually think that there is a wide-spread conspiracy by the media to “dupe” the “rest” of America by telling them “lies” about things like global warming, evolution, etc, and, above all, the Obama administration.
But what was so heartening about this particular election was how WRONG all of these people were proven. (Conservative media, for example, had their own polls which showed Romney ahead this whole time, and suddenly everyone is scrambling to explain how it is that the rest of the country, which they’d laughed at as being “delusional,” wound up being 100% right after all.)
I maybe got a little too in-depth here, but I do agree with you that it is, on some level, disturbing that Romney even came as close as he did. And yet just eight years ago, this country re-elected President Bush, so in the grand scheme of things, to move from that to where we are today, we’re at least making progress!!! Crazy though it may sound, I’m thrilled that Obama, however narrowly, actually won the popular vote! It gives me a lot of hope that maybe the people in this country aren’t quite as crazy as we sometimes think they are…or that, at the very least, the ones who make the loudest noise (with their craziness) don’t represent *quite* as much of the public as we thought they did. :)
Sidenote: After reading THIS POST on Wonkette, in which a Libertarian was calling on other Libertarians to cut themselves off from everyone in their lives who may have voted for Obama (seriously, you should read it; this man LITERALLY IS TELLING PEOPLE TO DIVORCE THEIR SPOUSES with differing political opinions), I logged into Facebook on a hunch...
ReplyDelete..and sure enough, I'd been defriended by a conservative.
Keep it classy, Republicans!
One last thing! Here is Rachel Maddow saying exactly what I said in the above (overly long comment), but much more eloquently:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMLcbTTdBGQ&feature=player_embedded
:)
Congrats! Really, from the bottom of my heart, I'm SO relieved by this outcome. Saved me from a serious depression.
ReplyDelete<3
That makes two of us!!!!! Now that it's done, I can't believe I ever doubted. :) But wow, it seemed like it could go either way there for a while...
Delete