Hope
Posted November 3rd, 2004 by Sean WilliamsI’m not sure how many posts are gonna come out of me in the next few days. A part of me thinks I won’t write again until the world rights itself, the other part of me knows I’m gonna scream until the rafters scream back.
This election was one of fear. Every single vote, yours and mine included, was cast in fear. We were all voting in the hopes of avoiding the horrible thing we think is going to happen. The Gay Marriage votes were not votes wherein people were hoping to end homosexuality, they were voting against the imagined queering of marriage. We voted for John Kerry because we are terrified of what another four years of President Bush will bring us.
And people voted for Bush because they were terrified of what would happen without him.
Democrats lost because we had nothing to vote *for*.
The way words work is endlessly fascinating to me. Think about the meaning of “acute” and “obtuse”, and how they become almost onomatopoeiac, I’ve already talked about how cool it is to refer to something as “remarkable”, as if anything less shouldn’t even be spoken about. The word that is haunting me today is “distinguished”.
If you distinguish one thing from another, you are clarifying it, you are giving it distinct parameters. John Kerry was attacked a number of times as having never distinguished himself, and they meant it both ways, that he had never risen above the fray politically and that he never seemed to *stand* for anything.
Now, this is a shitty position to be in, arguing that my guy couldn’t have won when yesterday morning I thought he was going to. But I’ll be completely honest, when his poll numbers looked good, when all the prediction sites had him winning, I was pleasantly shocked. As soon as we turned the TV on last night, I knew. Jordana knew, she could see it on my face, I even tried not to look at her, but I knew really really early.
Long before the called Florida, I knew the polls were a dream. And I knew that my nightmare was about to come true.