Dear Friend and Reader:
I’M WITH LARRY DAVID. Enough of this. I am so ready to get this election over and done with that I don’t know what to do with myself.
Around the water cooler in my office, the feeling is definitely one of a nationwide pregnancy in its last week. This is the political equivalent of the period before the baby drops low, your water bursts and the contractions and dilation and the pushing and the doctor yelling “Breathe!!!!” begins.
There are articles I’ve started in the Planet Waves hopper that are looking at me like abandoned children, eyes wide open and innocent pleading, “…where are you?” My sleep is plagued with waking at 3 am wondering if I have something to do. Anything. I wander around my little cottage, switching the TV on and off. Nothing.
Last night, I dreamt I was in bed trying to make myself scream. And not in the way one might think, oh prurient ones, but literally trying to scream my head off in total rage, using that scream to beat away the scary beast that was looking at me, bemusedly, wondering if I was ever going to get up off my butt and scare it back.
Then this morning, I read this diary at Daily Kos, and everything became crystal clear.
In my mind’s eye I can see my mail-in ballot on the kitchen table. It is covered with a stack of bills, neatly piled, but still on top.
AS IF THIS WAS JUST ANOTHER ELECTION.
If all my pent up, stacked-up continuous, layers-upon-layers of rage over the last eight years had a face, it would look exactly like those bills piled up on top of my mail-in ballot on the week before the biggest election in our country’s history takes place. So simple, yet so telling.
How easily we’ve been fed the lies, the cover-ups, the thefts of this country’s soul these last eight years. Eight years of criminals so dark and crimes so deep you only need a few words to remind you, like Watergate of their nature and historic precedence: Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rove. Gonzales. Alito. Roberts. Brownie. 9-11. Iraq. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Falujah. Katrina. Military Commission Act. Patriot Act. No Child Left Behind. To all, these last eight long years looking like so much junk mail and bills piled up on a kitchen table, with so much processing, shredding and check-writing I have to do, I added yet another chore: voting.