Election Aftermath: When all of your tears dry, let your troubles roll by.
Originally posted November 3, 2004:
I cried myself to sleep last night.
I woke up late, ran to work, then ran home on my lunch break and had a chance to take a quick glance at my friends list. And I started crying all over again. I have just looked at it again now, and I'm going to have to stop because I'm not even through 50 entries back and there's more despair and hurt and anger than I can bear.
Someone commented on my LJ to say essentially, 'Where are you? please say something to give us hope.' it means--wow, a lot, so much, to think that you would come to me and ask that, ask me to be a voice of hope today. It means so much. I am at work, and still processing everything that has happened, and I have nothing encouraging or hope-filled to say at the moment, but I am going to say this.
Please, my dear friends, all of you, stop saying "Bomb Ohio," or "everyone who voted for Bush is an idiot," or "they re-elected Bush because they were afraid of gay marriage," or anything else like that. Please. Just take a deep breath, and stop. 58 million American voters are not idiots. 58 million Americans are not radical right-wing conservatives, and even if they all were, they don't deserve to be treated like faceless monsters.
I know that everyone is hurting, god, don't I know it. But watching you guys rage against the people who elected Bush is by far the most painful part of this. No, I don't think we should come together and unite behind the president and be harmonious citizens. And I do think that anger is healthy right now, certainly much healthier than bleak despair. But. In your anger, please do your best to acknowledge that the 58 million people who voted for Bush are still people first, just like the other 58 million Kerry supporters. You cannot write them off as ignorant, homophobic, or madly religious, and the first step to achieving real long-term progress is for each of you to understand that. Ranting about how dumb/bigoted/insane/whatever the opposition is only further solidifies this nation into one big divide of Us/Them--and the furtherance of such division is the very thing we went to political war against Bush to try to prevent.
Someone else said to me last night, 'Is it really over, Aja?' as if they weren't going to give up hope until I did. And I think that is crucial to what is happening here. Right now we are all despairing. But I can't give up hope until every single last one of you has, and I know that there are plenty of you out there who haven't. Combine enough individual droplets of hope, and you have an ocean. So combine and nurture your last hopes. Weep, oh, weep. And rage. But hope.