Lift up your voice
It would seem that my voice wasn't loud enough. Neither, it would seem, was yours. While I am, at least, relieved that it doesn't look like we will have a lawsuit determine the President of the United States, the implications of last night's election results are simply too frightening for words. In Mississippi, some 86% of the voting population voted to officially make homosexuals second-class citizens. In Kentucky, a man was re-elected to the Senate despite using a teleprompter during a debate and joking that his opponent looked like one of Saddam Hussein's sons. Dubbya will get to name two, possibly three, justices to the Supreme Court and, in this political climate, he will have little difficulty putting another Scalia or Thomas on the bench. Can you say checks and balances? You may not be able to four years from now.
After the 2000 election, Karl Rove is reported to have been furious because he calculated there were 4 million more conservative Christian voters than had actually voted. If you look at the popular vote margin, it is just a little bit less than four million. Maybe he was right after all. The right did its job - it galvanized and got the vote out. To be fair, though, the left did its job too, just not as well.
Just not as well.
It boils down to that. We all owe it to ourselves and to our country to continue to build on how hard we worked to vote out Dubbya. Keep the level of dialog as intense as it has been. If you overhear a Republican talking politics, don't try to hit them with your car - histrionics and extremism only give them comfort that they're right - calmly debate them and talk to them. Continue to write polite but firm letters to the editor. Be heard. It won't get any better if we crawl into our shells and bemoan the reddening of middle America (as I was last night).