At Thanksgiving, as the post-election decompression finally leveled off, I started writing thank-you notes to total strangers. Why? Because this year, I wanted to make sure that I thanked the people who helped get me through the last few years—especially this past one. So I’ve written to a few bloggers, a few radio hosts and even two television anchors, but I’ve saved the best for last, or the last for the most, because this one is to the whole Daily Kos community and to Kos for creating it.
Like many a Democrat, I was pretty despondent after the 2004 election, feeling like a stranger in my own land. Stunned by the election results and Bush’s foolish claim of a ‘mandate’, I was also disbelieving at the apparent acceptance of the war, and of the outrageous actions of the Bush administration, which sadly generated little outrage at all.
While I was an occasional visitor to Daily Kos – and I had certainly followed the site’s excellent coverage of the 2004 campaign – those bleak days of 2005 had me searching for constant reassurance that there were others of similar mind, and I became a regular reader. I caught a glimpse of reality returning in the fall of 2005, when the tragedy of Katrina began to deflate the protective media bubble that had surrounded the Bush administration – but at what a cost, what a high, painful cost.
By May, 2006, Bush’s poll numbers were slipping, but I still flinched at the possibilities of the Republicans pulling another rabbit out of yet another hat in the mid-term elections. The turning point for me was in June of 2006, with the advent of the first Yearly Kos gathering. Alas, I couldn’t attend, but watching streaming video from that event heartened me like nothing else: to see committed citizens of all ages looking to take our country back literally brought me to tears. These were the good kind of tears, like I hadn’t shed in a long time. From that day on, I knew that there was a force in this country ready to be unleashed, and I also had the comfort of knowing I was not alone. For that I cannot thank you enough.
As we begin 2009, we have celebrations to look forward to: the beginning of the Obama Era and the end of the kakistocracy that defined the Bush era (see The End of Kakistocracy). For as much as people are thrilled about Obama’s victory, I believe that a good part of the roar that went up across the country on Election Night was just pure relief that the era of Bush is (almost) over and we’re apparently going to survive it.
While I will remain a Daily Kos regular, I doubt that I will be checking my required blogs every hour or three as I did throughout the amazing primary season and general election campaign. And in general I’m wondering if I will bring as much energy to the support of a progressive agenda as I brought to my opposition to the feckless actions and actors of the departing Bush regime. And the shifting economic climate requires that I pry myself away from the indulgence of politics to make up for the client work that’s disappearing.
I found a bit of inspiration in a book by the wonderful Irish writer John O’Donohue, who passed away suddenly just a year ago this week. In his book of blessings To Bless the Space Between Us, O’Donohue offers this poem:
FOR CITIZENSHIP
In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground.
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.
That’s what I’ll be working on: turning anxiety back into anger, and finding the way home.
Let me close with my thanks again and a sincere wish for a very Happy New Year to Kos and all the members of the Daily Kos community, and with a prayer for President-elect Obama and the members of his administration as they face the challenges ahead.