Election Reponse 2

Today, I wrote to sent the following e-mail to some friends:

I helped the Kerry team in Pennsylvania Monday night through late last night. Last night I was feeling great about what we'd done with PA, but I drove back in the wee hours of the morning, I began to get angry and heartbroken about the bigger picture, angry at potential cheating on the Republicans' part, pondering on how, for instance, Manish never got his absentee ballot from Cuyahoga County, and pondering on how, if we prolonged this fight for a few weeks, maybe all the irregularities would show up and Kerry would be awarded Ohio, in the end.

But now, I can't help noticing the big picture: Bush won the popular vote by 3.7 million--the first presidential candidate to win an absolute majority since 1988, and the candidate receiving the highest number of popular votes (apparently) in American history. The exit polls say "moral values" played a big role, Republicans gain 3 net seats in senate, NH went blue while the entire South and desert Southwest has gone red, and the ballot initiatives forbidding gay marriage passed in all 11 states that they came up in.

Sure there were irregularities in voting that hurt us but they can't explain the above, can't explain why the majority of our voters would select an imbecilic stooge of a religious fanatic who, with his cabal of liars, comprised one of the most incompetent and delusional presidential administrations ever. History will not smile on the two terms of the Bush presidency. How did this happen? I've got 3 words: the culture wars. The above tells us something about who the bulk of Americans are, how they think, how they feel. John Kerry conceded just now, calling for unity and saying "When we wake up, we're all American." No. If being American means what we saw last night, then I have to say: when I wake up, I'm not American. And since the clump comprising the Northeast, Upper Great Lakes, and West Coast will not secede from the Union, I have no choice but to think that my worthiest goal is NOT political activism here in the U.S. but rather to finish my Ph.D. at Yale as soon as possible and seek to repatriate to Canada or the UK. I'm sure many of you, my good friends, feel the same way. Maybe one day, a few years from now, we'll have a smashing party when we all end up moving to Notting Hill.

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And here, taken from the Friendster pic of a friend of a friend, a different way to express the feeling: