A year ago, I was happily ensconced in the trials and celebrations of my own life. My biggest problems were the fact that my long-promised raise had yet to materialize and saving up for my planned move to Oregon.
Fast forward to today. I made it to Oregon. I'm even making it on my own, running a freelance web programming business that fits my definitions of success (I make enough to live and I work on my own terms). But I'm much less content than I was. The reason: BlogForAmerica and DailyKos.
OK, so blaming all my problems on blogs is probably going a little too far. Quarterly estimated tax payments are certainly not Kos' fault, for one thing. I can't blame clients who don't pay on time on Howard Dean
or his supporters at BFA. And to be really fair, the problem is not with the blogs themselves, but with my changing interests and the feelings of helplessness that come with them.
You see, over the past year I've gone from someone only marginally interested in politics (I researched the candidates and then voted, but that was about it) to passionately supporting one candidate (Dean, despite the lessons I should have learned when Bradley went down in 2000) to becoming voraciously interested in matters of politics and policy. I'm learning new words, and about new people. I know more about the workings of this country and the current events around the world than I ever did before. My interest is branching out into different avenues, from economics to history to law. It's been an amazing process of discovery.
So where's the problem? I can't turn it off. I can't stop thinking of things in political terms, can't stop reading the news every day, can't stop weighing various scenarios against the chances of victory in November and beyond. I can't find a happy medium between elation (the smirking chimp has no chance to survive and should make his time!) and despair (somebody set up us the bomb, but they haven't dropped it yet). I can't seem to be objective about it all.
Of course, no one else seems to be able to, either. Every time I try to escape the echo chamber for a while, to get an unvarnished look at the odds come November, all I manage to find is a new echo - people repeating the same things over and over, with no more objectivity, if a different objective, than those of us here on Kos.
Even worse, I feel like I'm rather less than a cog in the machine - I'm a replacement cog sitting on a shelf. Thanks to Diebold and ES&S, I don't even have confidence that my vote will mean anything when I cast it. I alternate between believing that there's no way this country could elect Bush in 2004, and believing that it doesn't matter what we vote; the totals will show whatever our corporate masters decide is best for them.
So I guess there's no real conclusion here. No call to action, no burning questions. You can't put the genie back in the bottle until he's done his thing. I know I'm going to keep doing the same things, and I know that like it or not, I won't know the answers until November.
Maybe I'll try out for Big Brother 5. Then I'd get to escape it all for a month :P