It’s been a long four years.
It’s gonna be another long four years.
I’m someone who’s still mad at the supporters of Bush in 2000 who sported the "SORE/LOSERMAN" bumper stickers, taking an election full of legitimate things that went not-right and using it to go "neener neener neener" at anyone who complained about it. In that spirit, I read this morning’s paper, which went to press when the candidates were separated by two electoral votes, both nearly 20 short of the needed 270, and got annoyed at Bush supporters who were "angry" over Kerry not conceding by then.
Come on. Switch the circumstances, and imagine Bush behind by two electoral votes. You really think Bush would have conceded then? So don’t bitch about the other side not doing what you wouldn’t do.
I’m still wrapping my mind around the results in several races. Wins for things and people I believe in were few and far between. I’m happy that a local income-tax repeal (spearheaded by some of my county’s bigger tax-whiners) was voted down, but several measures that seemed to me to be Cataclysmically Bad Ideas won by wide margins, and I’m not looking forward to the fallout from them. And there will be fallout, messy and complicated, from the local level to the world level. The potential for pissing off ever-larger blocs of humanity, in my opinion, just shot up.
I want this to be a better nation. In that vein, the best thing I’ve read online today is this message from LiveJournaler 
robyn_ma in Massachusetts. Go, scroll down and see.
So…move onward we must. Mitigate what we see as damage. Work harder and more diligently. Hope for no disaster. I quote Radiohead: "No alarms and no surprises, please."