Let's face it, we have the most credibility among people we know (hopefully). For about two years I've been growing an e-mail list of family, friends and acquaintances, and it's almost 200 people today. My goal is to give them political information they would not otherwise have, and turn everyone of them into active progressives. It's a battle with some (I grew up in Texas after all), but I think I've had influence on many. Here is a post of my most recent letter to the list, about the election and moving forward from it. I thought some of you might enjoy the thoughts. Several ideas came from DailyKos.
Is Our Nation an Ostrich Stuck Deep In the Sand? The Short Novel.
Both in terms of volunteer time and money, by a long shot, neither Courtney nor I had ever put so much effort into a campaign. I'll stop writing for Courtney, but at least initially, I made the effort because of Bush, not Kerry. I sincerely view Bush's policies - the regressive, irresponsible tax cuts; the lob-sided, clientelist energy and environmental policy; the cynically under-funded "Poor Children Left Behind" Act; and, perhaps primarily, the simplistic, unilateral, deceptive and militaristic foreign policy - as pernicious to this country. My motivation was to get Dumbo out of office. Yet as I got to know Kerry and the policies he stands for (at least as much as one can get to know from reading about his political and personal past, his proposals, and of course from TV), I liked and respected him much more than most of his "supporters" seemed to. Kerry, not Bush, motivated me through to the bitter end. Fn.1
Fn.1 One short example of what I got to like about Kerry, something I unfortunately read about only after the election: a couple of weeks before November 2, ole' Billy C' and James Carville advised Kerry to stump hard in all of the close but more conservative states, and publicly support states' right to have legal bans on gay marriage. At the time, fresh after the debates showed the United States of Amnesia and the world such a clear choice between a competent Senator and an arrogant moron, many polls showed that such close states included Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Arizona, as well as New Mexico, Ohio and Florida. The "cultural values" election that followed showed us all that this was probably good political advice. But Kerry didn't take the advice. He didn't believe in what Slick Willie was proposing. Who would have thought? The man whom many characterized as too political and lacking in principle, out of principle ignored the advice of perhaps the only Democratic strategists rivaling Karl Rove in political cunningness and intuition. Personally, I viewed Kerry as a man of principle for a long time before the election, certainly about 1,000% more than Bush. The fact that he volunteered to serve in Vietnam and risked his life there (contrast Dumbo, who used his Congressman pops' name to draft dodge) is one indicator. Another is that he had the courage to come back and speak as loudly as he could against the war once he saw firsthand what it was - an immoral disaster. His record in Congress is yet another indicator: always well-thought out votes (yes, sometimes the economy calls for deficit spending and sometimes it doesn't; and sometimes cuts in military spending are probably a damn good idea); he spent much of his time investigating and calling out corruption such as Iran-Contra and securities fraud (again, contrast Dumbo, whom a few years later was to use his family's influence once again to stonewall an investigation against him for illegal insider trading, after he made millions from selling off his interest in Harken Energy shortly before the company tanked).
The downside of our efforts, of course, was the harder fall after November 2. I'm sure this happened to many. Thousands and thousands of people put in more time and/or money into the Kerry campaign than we did, including people on this list. One that comes to mind is flying to Cleveland from L.A. and standing in the cold rain all day and well into the evening on Nov. 2 to make sure people's right to vote was protected.
I won't torture you and describe everything that we did for Kerry's campaign, but the culmination of our efforts was memorable. We road tripped to Phoenix the Sunday before the election. My cousin Diana, who was visiting us in LA from Bogotá, enthusiastically came with us, video camera in hand. Like most people from other countries, she has trouble understanding how so many gringos like Bush.
On the eve of the election we walked door-to-door in a poor, largely Hispanic neighborhood showing some feeble signs of gentrification. Most of the "gentrifiers" seemed to be liberal gays. Our mission being a targeted get-out-the-vote drive, almost everyone we talked to was a Kerry supporter. We learned something interesting from all of our conversations and finished the day energized and optimistic. Many Hispanics living in some of the more run-down houses were either undecided or instinctively said Bush when we asked whom they supported. They would almost never say why, often with a simple "I don't know." After talking to them for less than five minutes, targeted on two points - (i) the vast majority of soldiers ending up in Iraq (most seemed to recognize it as an unjustified war) come from poor neighborhoods like this one, and (ii) Bush's tax cuts come at the expense of programs that benefit primarily people like them - most had changed their minds (or they were polite, good liars) and were thankful for our visit. Fn.2.
Fn.2. If you're interested, after the election I posted some thoughts on the Hispanic vote in the blogosphere and received some good feedback
here.
One of the few white people we talked to was a sweet eighty-year old man who talked intelligently about his ambivalence on Kerry but huge disappointment with Bush. He was leaning Kerry so we kept talking to him. Then he busted out with his primary qualm against Bush: he was way too tolerant of those god dammed immigrants. That ended our conversation. Even this one was kind of memorable because the rest of it was very informed-sounding. Our only "negative" conversation was with, appropriately, a nonresident landlord coming to check on his property. He was a bulky white man wearing full-on business casual on a hot Phoenix afternoon. As he made a point of telling us as he drove off in his silver SUV, he was voting for Bush because he "had become a lot richer in the last four years." Just a bump in the road.
The next day I split the day between more door-knocking and supervising a precinct as an attorney-monitor for the Democratic Party. Courtney monitored all day. The required non-partisanship of monitoring inside the voting place was surprisingly refreshing. Again we were in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, explaining the ballot in Spanish to many people. In this particular precinct, about three times as many people voted this election as in 2000 (this year it was still only about 300 people). About 25% of voters showed a valid id and said they were registered, but had to vote on provisional ballots because they did not make the registration list. We reported this high number to the DNC.
After polls closed, we were pumped up driving to our friends Mary Beth and Bill's house. Our optimism grew when we heard the leaked exit poll numbers on the radio, indicating a 4-point Kerry lead in Ohio and a smaller lead in Florida. The rest of the night sucked. At one point we checked out of the TV spin and simply started listening to music and monitoring CNN on the internet. Florida, then Ohio started showing Bush leads as precincts started reporting their surprisingly fast counts. But cnn.com pretty late into the evening still had these exit polls showing Kerry leading comfortably in Ohio and by a smaller but definitive margin in Florida (CNN would a little later remove the exit polls from its website, but many a blogger downloaded the page while it was up). Despite the exit polls, we lost hope and went to bed.
The drive between Phoenix and L.A. is beautiful, particularly at sunset or sunrise. As the sun rose behind us on our drive West, the majestic and bare desert mountains that flanked us reflected incomprehensible variations of gold. It was breathtaking, but I don't remember a drive so melancholy. We arrived straight into downtown L.A. five hours later, just as Kerry gave his concession speech on the radio. Both of us had work piled up to our necks after two days away. As Kerry's voice cracked during his emotional speech, there was little left to do but cry in frustration and disappointment.
It was Christianism, not Christianity.
If one is to believe exit polls (not in Ohio or Florida, of course), it was the millions of "values" voters that put Bush over the edge because of abortion and gay marriage. Most of you know I'm not exactly a regular presence at church on Sundays, but I think I have at least a basic understanding of Christian doctrine. The "religion" that these voters are clinging to is Christianism, not Christianity. Christianism does not recognize the separation of church and state. It's an interpretation of the religion in its worse form, founded on intolerance, absolutism and hatred rather than compassion and equality. In that sense, it's based on the same principles as the fundamentalist Islam that plagues so much of the Middle East, which ignores the Koran's kinder, gentler side.
It's beyond me how any self-described Christian would not see the treacherous hypocrisy of supporting a president [sic- I do not capitalize the word for him] that launched a ruthless war based on deception, or at best indifferent recklessness. Fn. 3. As if the deception going into the war were not enough, the Bush administration by all but the most partisan accounts has done a terrible job in administering "post-war" Iraq, thanks in large part to incompetent preparation and ideological arrogance. How can people pretend that this does not show gross indifference towards the sanctity of human life - one of the most basic tenets of Christianity? This horrible war has caused anywhere from 12,000-16,000 INNOCENT Iraqis and well over one thousand American soldiers to lose their lives. Fn. 4.
Fn. 3. Once again, the theme that we live in the "United States of Amnesia" creeps up on the collective denial in this country about the possibility of deception by this administration. Congress inexcusably "postponed" investigating the administration's role in the Iraq "intelligence" failure until after the election - heaven forbid that we find out the truth before we reelect the liar. Something funny tells me the investigation is never going to happen. But without question, it should happen, and it is a direct affront to our democracy for the sake of partisanship not to. Let's go back to before the war. It seems now largely accepted that intelligence throughout the world was saying Iraq had WMDs, including a viable nuclear weapons program. It was the intelligence that failed us, not our God-sent administration. Maybe in part it was intelligence, but this image of consensus among the world's intelligence community could not be further from the truth. The fact that so many people blindly chant this conclusory rhetoric is a testament to the effectiveness of the Bush administration's manipulation of the media ever since 9/11. The fact is, the people closest to possibly finding out the truth - weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq - were saying that (a) they were getting full access to everything they wanted, and (b) they weren't finding any evidence of viable WMD programs. But, instead, the administration relied on intelligence of the likes of Chalabi, a known fraudster who hadn't lived in Iraq since 1956 and hadn't even stepped foot in Iraq since 1996. But, hey, his "intelligence" in 2001 coincided perfectly with the administration's ideology. The "mushroom cloud" imagery so effectively propounded by Cheney and our next Secretary of State is the worst of it all. There is plenty of public hard evidence that the hypotheses saying Hussein had a viable nuclear program were seriously flawed - people senior to and more experienced than the proponents of the nuclear program hypothesis were openly pointing out the flaws to the administration. But their words were ignored and hidden from the public. If you doubt me here, as I have no doubt some of you do, I highly recommend you read the thorough investigative report that the New York Times published on this issue in early October - I downloaded it and it's attached to this e-mail. Another good source is a June 2002 Newsweek article on the intelligence subject, shortly after the war had ended (I remember the date but unfortunately don't have the article to link). Bob Woodward's one-liner about how Bush asked George Tenet, "Is that all you've got?" sure does take on a lot more significance in light of all the evidence that, yeah, that's all he had, but he also had plenty of stuff going the other way. The fact is also that several publications and radio shows were talking about the administration's manipulation of intelligence before and at the beginning of the war. But the main stream press was so cowardly (several, including the New York Times, have recognized this failure) that this type of reporting was relegated to what most people consider "leftist" (and therefore automatically non-credible) journalism like The Nation and "Democracy Now" on your local Pacifica radio station. The fact is, such publications/shows are often independent, which means they are much better at producing good, risky investigative journalism. Some of their reporting about particular topics is biased, true, but they were dead on the mark on the war, before it and during it. And hey, the sycophant, inherently risk-averse main stream press needs a serious alternative, at least every once in a while. If Iraq doesn't prove that, I don't know what does.
Fn. 4. Most estimates of civilian casualties are in this range, none that I've seen are lower. One study by John's Hopkins University puts the number closer to 100,000. The U.S. government, of course, doesn't care enough to keep count. Here's a grim fact about these numbers: even the low-ball figure (12,000) is a higher civilian death rate per year than under the all-evil Saddam Hussein.
It's impossible at this point to determine how many of those innocent lives American weapons have caused, but it can't be too small a figure given the amount of bombing that we do and the fact that our poor soldiers, most of the time, probably have no clue who the enemy is. And I'm sure more than a few Iraqis also blame the U.S. for the deaths the insurgents are causing. Frankly, I would. Let's not forget that: Iraq didn't have this ruthless terrorist insurgency before we invaded; Iraqis have long been fed only anti-American propaganda; and some of our conduct (undoubtedly the conduct that gets the most attention in Iraq) easily confirms that propaganda. Fn. 5.
Fn. 5. Some examples of our conduct: securing the oil ministry before any other building in or around Baghdad - this included a failure to secure weapons caches like Al QaQaa near Baghdad, even though we already knew it to hold a dangerous amount of explosives; allocating a miserly sum to reconstruction ($18 billion), and then at least as of this summer releasing a meager $400,000 of this (I haven't followed up on the current figure); during our recent entry into Falluja, securing the hospital first and preventing any reporting of civilian casualties, and of course proceeding by reporting nothing about civilian casualties; our next attorney-general's torture memo and, just coincidentally I'm sure, the subsequent awful instances of torture. Need I go on here? For a great account of incompetence early in the war by a journalist that was on the ground, see this
Salon article. If you don't have a password to Salon send me an e-mail and I'll give you mine.
I realize there are important differences between Vietnam and Iraq, but it's dangerous to ignore the similarities. The role that our country is playing in civilian casualties, which in my mind is the biggest factor that killed any chance of success in Vietnam, is an important similarity. Indiscriminate bombing, guerrilla warfare leading to civilian massacres, widely-reported torture, heavy unemployment, it's all there. There's that "United States of Amnesia" theme again.
Yeah, what a religious man, Bush. Do you think he goes to sleep at night thinking about those lives lost? Or the life-long trauma (physical and mental) that thousands of American soldiers now face? Hmmm, let me guess. I'd bet a lot of money that he's not. It drives me insane that so many Americans voted to reelect this jackass, and makes me feel like I hate this militaristic country, at least its current government and the millions of sheep that blindly follow it.
The second part of the Christianists' hypocrisy is Bush's domestic economic policy. The most frustrating part here is that so many people voted against their own economic interests. By all accounts, Bush's economic policy gives huge benefits to the Haves, and it's naïve to think that it won't or hasn't come at the expense of the Have Nots. For anyone out there who took high school economics, just think opportunity costs. It's indeed been a great four years for the richest people in this country. But more than 5 million people have lost access to any health care; poverty has increased across the nation; real wages have declined. But the Repuglican-controlled (aka neo-con, not to be confused with Republican) Federal government in the last four years did nothing but starve itself of resources for programs that could alleviate those pains. How Christian.
The whole concept of mixing religion and politics troubles me, but to the extent that it's unavoidable in this increasingly theocratic country, the Democratic Party needs a serious strategy to bring out the Christian side of people all across this nation, "red" and "blue" state alike, and find a way to make them get over their Christianist tendencies that the Repuglicans have so happily and effectively fueled. Maybe I was a little harsh before in labeling many of these "values" voters blind sheep. People are complicated and I'm sure most are also at least somewhat troubled with the contradictions between their religion on the one hand, and the war in Iraq and Bush's economic policy, on the other. Or, really, they don't know or care so much but just watch Fox News exclusively, their family has always voted Republican, and so forth. Making inroads into the entrenched Christianist perspective is going to take time and should start now.
It's conjecture on my part to argue that any such effort wouldn't be futile, but here are some advantages that I see: (a) for most "values" Bush voters, I'm guessing that their economic interests are actually at odds with Bush's economic policy; (b) their pet "Christianist" issues are fundamentally private affairs (abortion, marriage) that - serious need of a reality check here - only affect the people that do it and their inner circle of friends and family, while the more "Christian" concepts of peace (or, heck, at least not going to war based on lies) and kindness to the poor are inextricably tied to the role of our government, and the government's policies with respect to those issues affect all of us; (c) Bush now has to deal with his own gutter economic and foreign policy - it's his mess to deal with for four years, and I have little doubt that he'll continue to orchestrate policy based on ideology and stubbornness rather than reason (what more evidence of this trend do I need than the even stronger neo-con turn his new cabinet is showing?); and (d) though it was in a losing effort, all indications (records numbers of low-dollar fundraising; record numbers of volunteers) point to a huge grassroots wave of activism on the left that this election created compared to past elections. The key is going to be to stay mobilized and active through 2006 and 2008. It takes a lot more time than just an election cycle. Let's face it, the Chrisitanist far-right has been very organized at an institutional level all across the country for a very long time. Several journalists have viewed that movement as an effort that started when Barry Goldwater (if you look at his candidacy, he was pretty close to the neo-cons of today) lost all but a handful of electoral votes against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
I'll tell you one thing. The day the Democratic Party strays further to the right and takes a policy position of opposition to gay marriage in an effort to woo more conservative voters, that is the day I will stop voting for any of its candidates that don't openly oppose that position. And I think I speak for a large percentage of the Democratic "base" on this point. I view it as no more and no less than, first, a private matter, but second, because the government has its hand in marriage, as a fundamental question of equal rights. If you don't agree on the equal rights issue, you should spend a little time looking up marriage laws in your state - there are many government-given benefits to marriage that are not often discussed (except by Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, that brave soul).
Was there outcome-determinative election fraud in 2004?
I'll start off by saying that there is no hard evidence of this. No smoking-gun, if you will. But I have little doubt that there was widespread fraud, if not outcome determinative. That it may have been outcome determinative would not surprise me. In fact, though there is no smoking gun, I think there are plenty of sketchy facts to so indicate.
My unfortunate thinking (I wish I were more optimistic- it's so much easier) starts because I became incredibly cynical after the 2000 elections or, more accurately, after I read as much as I could about what happened in Florida. This cynicism will probably last forever or at least until I see some real election reform in this country. Nobody questions that the "hanging chad" crap affected primarily poorer, Democratic neighborhoods. But partisans can argue endlessly about the need to have standards that eliminate most of these unclear votes, even on recounts.
From a legal perspective, the most black-and-white example of fraud in Florida 2000 involves the felon purge lists that Florida used. The bottom-line is this: slightly more than half of the states allow their ex-felons to vote. Florida is not one of them. But two Florida Supreme Court cases hold that Florida cannot prevent ex-felons that moved to Florida from those 1/2 of states from voting in national elections. In 2000, the Supervisor of Elections in Florida (Katherine Harris of course), who also happened to be a co-chair for Bush's election campaign in Florida (Fn. 6), contracted a private corporation (coincidentally, whose management gave millions to Bush, $0 to Democrats) to gather the state's felon voting purge list. The list excluded ALL felons without regard to the state where they were considered felons, in clear violation of Florida law. There are leaked e-mails that show that Katherine Harris's office knew damn well that this was the case, but did nothing about it. They never even made the effort to correct the list. The number of ex-felons that should have had the right to vote but could not was about 32,000. The catch is, of course, that about 90% of ex-felons tend to vote Democratic. There is a pending lawsuit against Harris brought by the NAACP based on this. Fn. 7. The law suit is broiled down in procedural hurdles, including Harris's claim of immunity because she was a Florida government official and is now a Congresswoman.
Fn. 6. What the hell happened to the concept of conflicts of interest? Or, are politicians so inherently honest that they can be exempt?
Fn. 7. For a thorough review of this issue and others in the 2000 Florida election, see Greg Pallast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Chapter 1. Some of his other chapters are way out there, but this one is very well investigated, and he has gained international recognition for his reporting on this issue.
Which brings me to my next point. What the friggin' can we expect from future elections if voter fraud goes completely unpunished, and in fact gets rewarded? Katherine Harris broke the law and this determined the 2000 election, but she got elected to Congress? Are we living in reality here?
So, this year, plenty of people were watching out for possible voter fraud. A lot of sketchy examples of attempts at suppressing the Democratic vote came out before the election. Fn. 8. But was enough done? On November 23, the non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO) announced that it is launching an investigation into election irregularities this year. GAO is responding to more than 57,000 complaints from across the country, involving primarily the accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots (see our provisional ballot experience in Arizona, above). Fn. 9.
Fn. 8. I made a compilation of these shortly before the election and posted it on the blogosphere
here, if you're interested.
Let's look at some of the sketchy circumstances that are public information today:
About 8 months ago, Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, wrote that we should all be weary on election day if exit polls reflect something different from the actual counts. His reference was to the danger of fraud if computer voting did not also include paper trails. The New York Times later wrote that "Computer scientists, who understand the technology better than anyone else, have been outspoken about the perils of electronic voting." Just a simple manipulation of the source code can change hundreds of thousands of votes, and without paper trails it is impossible to verify whether or not this was done.
* Many elections supervisors, including Kenneth Blackwell (Elections supervisor in Ohio, and once again a co-chair of the Bush reelection campaign there - hello?) and Glenda Hood (Katherine Harris's successor in Florida, also staunchly GOP) fought tooth and nail to prevent paper trails for electronic voting. Why the hell, outside of the possibility of manipulation that benefits you, would you oppose paper trails if you are the person responsible for the integrity of the voting process in your state? Not coincidentally, these two states, by far, with the possible exception of Nevada, also had the greatest incidents of attempts at voter suppression before the election (see the reference in Footnote 8).
* I also find it as no coincidence that the exit polls in Florida and Ohio were very different from the "counts." Talking heads can attack the integrity of exit polls all they want, but the fact is that the methodology of the exit polls is not public information, so they can only talk out of the ars. And other facts about exit polls are that: it just so happened that 2004 exit polls in 47 out of 50 states were dead-on accurate, just not in Ohio, Florida (where Kerry won according to the exit polls) or Pennsylvania (where exit polls showed Kerry with a much larger lead than the end result); exit polls are based on counts of about 3,500 - 4,000 people, way more than the pre-election polls that were everyone's obsession; and up until 2000, TV stations trusted exit polls enough to actually use them to call state-by-state elections (they stopped after they called Florida for Gore based on exit polls- as it turn out, they were probably right initially). I find it very strange that just those couple of exit polls could have been so inaccurate. What's the theory? That at the very end of the day a bunch of Repuglicans bum-rushed the voting booths to overcome a deficit of thousands of votes in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania? Bull. The only reports I've seen have been of long lines in heavily-Democratic precincts late into the evening.
* There have been some troubling findings of faulty electronic voting already, but the main stream press is staying away from them. Just a couple of these: (a) In Broward County, Florida, electronic voting machines counted backwards - as more people voted, the official vote count went down; (b) in one Columbus, Ohio suburb, election officials have acknowledged that electronic voting machines credited Bush with winning 4,258 votes, even though only 638 people voted there.
* Countless other problems exist. For example, poor neighborhoods across the nation, once again particularly egregiously in Ohio, had less voting booths per voter than more affluent neighborhoods. It is not strange that long lines dissuade many voters.
So, given this small compilation of circumstancial evidence (there's a lot more out there), it should be no surprise that I HAVE ZERO TRUST IN THE ELECTIONS SUPERVISORS OF OHIO AND FLORIDA AND I THINK THE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES WERE MANIPULATED, along with many other voter suppression tactics. I haven't seen any proof to the contrary, just no smoking gun on what I think (but we knew eight months ago that there could be no smoking gun without paper trails). Someone please tell me, what reason do I have to trust that these people were honest? Clearly our institutions are faulty, and I don't trust people per se. Even if I did, the pre-election voter suppression tactics take me well beyond per se.
The future.
So where do I personally go from here in terms of any sort of political activism? Part of me definitely wants to just tune the f
!!k out and live my life mostly oblivious to politics. Obviously I realize it doesn't affect my day-to-day so much. Heck, I get a nice tax refund thanks to the regressive tax cuts. Maybe I should just indulge in the materialistic culture of this country at its worst and just focus on helping our consumer-driven economy. But as I write this long, long piece I realize I'm likely not headed in that direction.
An important part of me is attracted to becoming a happily uninvolved ex-pat in a more peaceful country. Costa Rica comes to mind - an environmentally friendly country with no military; substantial policies that protect its poor; beautiful beaches; affordable; and, at least since Dumbo took over here, much more responsible fiscal policy. Who's to say they don't have a better long-term model of prosperity than we do? In fact, I personally think they do, particularly on the military side of things. Fn. 10. I have increasingly little faith that something like social security will exist by the time I retire, should I need it. I have increasingly little faith that my kids would be able to go to a good public school here, should I want them to have that diverse experience. I have increasingly little faith that elections here are even fair, perhaps the most troubling of my concerns. But I do have lots of confidence that Courtney and I can do just fine for ourselves, happily living abroad. A little surf/yoga/scuba shack on the Pacific. Ahhhh. Friends and family are the biggest impediments, of course, and to be so isolated from loved ones could prevent happiness. But think of it- you'd have a very zen place to come vacation any time you want! You'd keep us company sometimes right? Mom?
Fn. 10. Let's face it, the links between our military and economic prowess are another thing about which too many Americans have their heads stuck in the sand. We consume 25% of the world's energy (limited resources as far as we know, of course) but are only 2% of the world's population. This insatiable consumption fuels (notice the pun, eh?) an important percentage of our economic growth. If you don't think we're willing to use our military prowess to secure our economic interests, please. Every nation in the history of the world has always done so. Please, also, if you think oil didn't have at least a part in our invasion of Iraq. Bush can stick the rhetoric about freedom and human rights up his ars. If that were truly our primary interest, we would have intervened in Iraq in the late 1980s, and today we would have long intervened in the non-oil rich Sudan. What good is it to call the situation in Sudan genocide if you then do nothing about it? No - purely economic interest may seldom be the only factor in our military interventions, but it is always at least part of it. So, as we need more energy out of an increasingly limited world supply of resources, something has to give. Increasingly extended military prowess not only drains our economic resources (indeed what has led to the decline of many a hegemony in the past) but also makes us more vulnerable in the long run as we antagonize the rest of the world. I sense a vicious downward spiral here. Perhaps the only way out is renewable, clean energy resources. Should we just assume that's going to happen and chill? I'd rather lessen the growing pains with something closer to Kerry's proposal ($10 billion in 10 years) than Bush's unrestrained bull shit rhetoric.
But a large part of me also isn't ready for that. Ultimately, this country did give my mom, brother and me opportunities difficult to come by in most other countries. And I'd be giving Dumbo and his Repug cronies way too much credit if I thought eight years of their arrogant, clientelist rule would bring down the things about this country that gave us those opportunities. It's taken almost 200 years of similar gutter politics in Colombia to create so many problems there, and hey, Colombia is still a fantastic country because of its people.
And the same goes for the United States. 56 million Americans did vote for Kerry - more than voted for Clinton either in 1992 or 1996 - and that certainly gives me hope. The amazing stories of dedicated, volunteer activism all over the country because they wanted to see a change in the direction of this country has taken - that gives me hope. The people I met while walking door to door in Phoenix on the eve of the election (except for the landlord, and perhaps the 80-year old anti-immigrant) - that gives me hope. If anyone actually read this until the end, that gives me hope. I'm tempted to think that the American spirit is too simple and this country is headed straight downhill, but my heart and all of these things tell me it's not the case.
The end. Finally.
NOT MY PRESIDENT!