Everyone posting today about how depressed he/she is or how his/her world has come crashing down… you know what? It just isn’t so.
Even our huge government with its $2,500,000,000,000 budget is just a tiny, tiny part of our everyday lives. You have family and friends to enjoy your lives with. You have endless opportunities to expand your mind, create works of art, make new scientific discoveries, or even just sit on your ass if you want.
Keep fighting for whatever political goals you have, but in the grand scheme of your lives, the government just isn’t that important, and it’s not worth dragging yourself down over.
f you’re depressed over this election, you need to sit yourself down and re-evalutate your priorities.
If Kerry had won, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The anti-SSM ballot initiatives were all slam-dunks. Fuck the state on this, and just go get married in a gay-friendly church. Or, vacation in MA and get married there.
I do feel bad about this for our gay posters here, but it just is not going to change any time soon. Take your life in your own hands and don’t wait for the rest of the country to catch up.
John, I’m not given to melodramatics. I hope I’ve established that in my time on these boards.
Because of this election’s results, I expect that several thousand Americans will die. And for every American that dies, I expect that ten non-Americans will die.
I expect this president to continue fighting unnecessary wars in ways that continue to alienate us from the rest of the world. I expect his foreign policy to be a Christmas gift to terrorist recruiters. I expect some of those terrorists to launch successful, horrific attacks in the US. And I expect the US response to those attacks to be overwhelming and even more horrific.
Forgive me if I’m upset for a day or two. Yes, life will go on for me; it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll be dying because of this election, I’m lucky that way. But right now, things look pretty dark.
Tell that to the people who have sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, lovers, or friends stationed in Iraq, and are praying that they come home on their own two feet and not in a flag-draped coffin.
Tell that to the consenting adults who can’t make a legal commitment to share their lives with the people they love, because they happen to love someone of the same gender.
Tell that to everyone who is gravely ill and has no way of paying for medical care; every worker who was laid off when his/her job was outsourced overseas; every pregnant woman who doesn’t want or isn’t equipped to take care of a child.
I’d say the current state of the government has a pretty fucking huge impact on their lives.
You remember that next time you are in a car accident and your life is draining away onto the floor of an ambulance searching for the emergency room, which closed because it was overwhelmed by patients for whom it was the only source of health care. I hope you live to curse them and their misfortune.
Got a news flash for ya. Wars, even fantastically stupid and unnecessary ones (such as the one in Iraq), have been enjoined by Democratic presidents throughout that party’s history, too. The assumption of Kerry to the presidency wasn’t a guarantee of the saving of the life of one single soldier (or civilian) - American, or otherwise. Kerry, in fact, made no promises to withdraw troops from either Iraq, or Afghanistan. Or keep them at home in the future.
Yes, we know. Nor is Bush’s election a guarantee that he’ll continue running the war in a way fraught with deadly stupidity. We’ve got no guarantees at all about the future.
All we have is the past by which to judge their actions, and that’s whence my sense of foreboding.
Tell any Iraqi that the US government is not the source of their happiness or dispair.
I don’t consider myself more important than any one of them. Just because I live in a country rich enough to be shielded from the havoc it wreaks doesn’t mean I’m not deeply concerned about the places where they do feel the effects.
Unless my fucking ass is slammed into prison because of a law written to please religious maniacs who want to drag America, kicking & screaming, into the 11th Century.
I’m a public school teacher, and my quality of life has definitely gone down in the last four years. With another four years of Bush, I can look forward to high-stakes testing, not enough money for paperclips and index cards, and more layoffs.
We give the government all this power and then are shocked, SHOCKED, when sometimes that power is used in ways we don’t like. The real answer is to not give it so much power in the first place. But even so, we Americans are largely in conrol of our own fates and need to quit looking to the government to solve all our problems.
I’m certainly no fan of federal mandates, but isn’t education largely a state affair? How about getting the feds out completely and keeping it local…?