In national news today, nothing's changed.
Nov. 3rd, 2004 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maradyddWhat did you do today?
My eight hours of sleep wrapped up around 11, and I dragged myself out of bed, got cleaned up, checked my email, went to campus, returned the papers I'd graded the night before, then sat down at my desk and worked on homework for my Computational Theory class. Around 5, I went to meet a bunch of friends for sushi at a restaurant a few blocks away. We discovered that the restaurant is no longer doing its usual weeknight happy hour, so we relocated to a nearby pasta joint, sat down, and had a leisurely dinner.
Except for the bit about the sushi happy hour, this is how I've spent every Wednesday since the beginning of the semester. I would have had the exact same day if the election results had been different. By and large, in that alternate universe, yours would have too, in nigh on every detail apart from the ones in your own head.
I've seen a greater outpouring of grief, anger and fear today than I have after any other election I've been alive for. Okay, so for Carter v. Reagan I was three, and I'm not entirely sure I knew what a president was back then. I was seven for Reagan v. Mondale, and I remember supporting Reagan because my dad did. By the time Bush I v. Dukakis rolled around, I had become an avid reader of Newsweek, and after reading a bullet-point summary of the candidates' positions on major issues, I started wearing a Dukakis button because he was in favour of nuclear energy and I thought that was a good idea. I don't even remember who I supported in Bush I v. Clinton, and in 1996 and 2000 I voted Libertarian by way of a protest vote. So I can't point to a long-standing track record of political awareness and advocacy on my part, but I mean, damn, people are reacting like the country just voted to make sex illegal.
People are upset; people feel hurt and betrayed; people are seeing stormtroopers in every shadow and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. People need, now more than ever, to calm down, take a step back, and maintain a sense of perspective.
It starts with taking a look at your immediate surroundings. Your desk is the same. Your computer is the same. Your friends and family are the same. So is your job, fortunately or unfortunately; if you had security yesterday, you've still got it today, and if you were worried yesterday about your job moving to the Philippines, well, that's probably not going to be any different either.
Thing is? That's how it would have been if the Democrats had won, too. John Forbes Kerry is neither the Second Coming of Christ nor of John F. Kennedy, and frankly, I'm glad he's neither. Nor is now the time to speculate on whether tomorrow's tomorrow would have been any better had the circumstances been reversed. You are not going to be woken up on Thursday by a squad of Ashcroft-appointed goons ready to haul you off to jail for the pr0n on your computer because Bush won the election, and you would not have woken up to hear NPR reporting that Osama bin Laden had renounced his anti-US beliefs and apologised for 9/11 if Kerry had won.
People artificially inflated their hopes, this election, beyond even those of the dot-com bubble, and I think what we're seeing now is the attendant disappointment that comes with any bubble being burst. On the plus side, however, we're in a far better situation than we were when the stocks started to fall. A comparatively small number of people entrusted their careers, their families, and their lives to the machine this time around. Michael Duff opines that Kerry's political career is over, and I suspect he's right. Nobody's crying for Al Gore, though, and nobody's going to cry for Kerry either. Both of them will make more money next year from speaker's fees alone than I will from both my jobs. I repeat: nobody's life is over because of this. The sun will continue to rise, your car will still need gas, your spouses and parents and kids still love you, and yes, you still have to go to work tomorrow.
The best I was hoping for out of this election was gridlock. That won't happen between the executive and the legislative, now, but we've got three conservative Supreme Court justices who are likely to die or retire sometime soon, and I can't complain about replacing them with three more of the same and leaving us with a SCOTUS that's balanced the same as what we have now. This is a good thing, to my mind. Of course, my favourite President was Calvin Coolidge, whose death prompted Dorothy Parker to remark, "How could you tell?", and I know I'm in the minority on that. But the largest benefit of not much happening on the national level is that it frees up more of our time and attention to do interesting things on the state, local and personal level. If it's a choice between sweeping change and boredom, I'll take boredom. I can figure out ways to keep myself busy, thanks.
A lot of people hoped this election would bring change. A lot of people worked very hard for that. But the difficult truth is that a year of campaigning isn't enough time for change. A year just isn't enough time to go to people, find out what their hopes and fears are, and convince them that the Foo Party can do what they need. A year isn't enough time to get J. Random Redneck to understand that gay marriage isn't a threat to the stability of society, that separation of church and state doesn't mean their kids can't exercise their beliefs, that people in Afghanistan and Iraq are just regular humans even if they are in a military prison. The beliefs you fear, the beliefs that prompted that swath of red across the map, are ones which cannot be altered by a single soundbite or even a single speech. Ways of life can and do change, but people need reasons, and a stump speech is just not enough. Five thousand TV commercials aren't enough. It takes hard work and a lot of time and consideration. It takes a lot more than a year.
(An aside: I'm of the opinion that most of the hooroar about benighted rednecks propelling Bush into office is just as blown out of proportion as the panic coming from the people who want to move to Canada right now. But whether it is or not, my point still holds: even moderate beliefs don't change overnight.)
Do you want change? Then start with what I pointed out earlier: the world around you. Quit preaching to the choir and have real conversations with people you might not normally talk to. If you genuinely believe that Jane at the office is misguided when she says that abortion should be outlawed, don't just write her off as a fundie whack-job. Swallow your ire and talk to her. Can you find out why? Can you get her to understand the consequences of imposing those beliefs on everyone, the contradiction they pose against freedoms that she probably takes for granted? If you can do that, you've just won yourself an advocate. That advocate will talk to other advocates, and it'll spread virally from there. You know this. Every one of you, O Audience I Can Count On One Hand1, has a working understanding of memetics and how ideas spread. Why not use it, instead of trying the same tired old Madison Avenue tactics that failed in 2000 and just failed again?
Nothing is different. We live today in the same nation we lived in yesterday, where people do the same things they've done all their lives and will go on doing tomorrow.
In a big way, that's why we're in the place we're in now.
"Men go crazy in congregations; they only get better one by one." -- Gordon Sumner
1 Okay, in binary. But still.
My eight hours of sleep wrapped up around 11, and I dragged myself out of bed, got cleaned up, checked my email, went to campus, returned the papers I'd graded the night before, then sat down at my desk and worked on homework for my Computational Theory class. Around 5, I went to meet a bunch of friends for sushi at a restaurant a few blocks away. We discovered that the restaurant is no longer doing its usual weeknight happy hour, so we relocated to a nearby pasta joint, sat down, and had a leisurely dinner.
Except for the bit about the sushi happy hour, this is how I've spent every Wednesday since the beginning of the semester. I would have had the exact same day if the election results had been different. By and large, in that alternate universe, yours would have too, in nigh on every detail apart from the ones in your own head.
I've seen a greater outpouring of grief, anger and fear today than I have after any other election I've been alive for. Okay, so for Carter v. Reagan I was three, and I'm not entirely sure I knew what a president was back then. I was seven for Reagan v. Mondale, and I remember supporting Reagan because my dad did. By the time Bush I v. Dukakis rolled around, I had become an avid reader of Newsweek, and after reading a bullet-point summary of the candidates' positions on major issues, I started wearing a Dukakis button because he was in favour of nuclear energy and I thought that was a good idea. I don't even remember who I supported in Bush I v. Clinton, and in 1996 and 2000 I voted Libertarian by way of a protest vote. So I can't point to a long-standing track record of political awareness and advocacy on my part, but I mean, damn, people are reacting like the country just voted to make sex illegal.
People are upset; people feel hurt and betrayed; people are seeing stormtroopers in every shadow and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. People need, now more than ever, to calm down, take a step back, and maintain a sense of perspective.
It starts with taking a look at your immediate surroundings. Your desk is the same. Your computer is the same. Your friends and family are the same. So is your job, fortunately or unfortunately; if you had security yesterday, you've still got it today, and if you were worried yesterday about your job moving to the Philippines, well, that's probably not going to be any different either.
Thing is? That's how it would have been if the Democrats had won, too. John Forbes Kerry is neither the Second Coming of Christ nor of John F. Kennedy, and frankly, I'm glad he's neither. Nor is now the time to speculate on whether tomorrow's tomorrow would have been any better had the circumstances been reversed. You are not going to be woken up on Thursday by a squad of Ashcroft-appointed goons ready to haul you off to jail for the pr0n on your computer because Bush won the election, and you would not have woken up to hear NPR reporting that Osama bin Laden had renounced his anti-US beliefs and apologised for 9/11 if Kerry had won.
People artificially inflated their hopes, this election, beyond even those of the dot-com bubble, and I think what we're seeing now is the attendant disappointment that comes with any bubble being burst. On the plus side, however, we're in a far better situation than we were when the stocks started to fall. A comparatively small number of people entrusted their careers, their families, and their lives to the machine this time around. Michael Duff opines that Kerry's political career is over, and I suspect he's right. Nobody's crying for Al Gore, though, and nobody's going to cry for Kerry either. Both of them will make more money next year from speaker's fees alone than I will from both my jobs. I repeat: nobody's life is over because of this. The sun will continue to rise, your car will still need gas, your spouses and parents and kids still love you, and yes, you still have to go to work tomorrow.
The best I was hoping for out of this election was gridlock. That won't happen between the executive and the legislative, now, but we've got three conservative Supreme Court justices who are likely to die or retire sometime soon, and I can't complain about replacing them with three more of the same and leaving us with a SCOTUS that's balanced the same as what we have now. This is a good thing, to my mind. Of course, my favourite President was Calvin Coolidge, whose death prompted Dorothy Parker to remark, "How could you tell?", and I know I'm in the minority on that. But the largest benefit of not much happening on the national level is that it frees up more of our time and attention to do interesting things on the state, local and personal level. If it's a choice between sweeping change and boredom, I'll take boredom. I can figure out ways to keep myself busy, thanks.
A lot of people hoped this election would bring change. A lot of people worked very hard for that. But the difficult truth is that a year of campaigning isn't enough time for change. A year just isn't enough time to go to people, find out what their hopes and fears are, and convince them that the Foo Party can do what they need. A year isn't enough time to get J. Random Redneck to understand that gay marriage isn't a threat to the stability of society, that separation of church and state doesn't mean their kids can't exercise their beliefs, that people in Afghanistan and Iraq are just regular humans even if they are in a military prison. The beliefs you fear, the beliefs that prompted that swath of red across the map, are ones which cannot be altered by a single soundbite or even a single speech. Ways of life can and do change, but people need reasons, and a stump speech is just not enough. Five thousand TV commercials aren't enough. It takes hard work and a lot of time and consideration. It takes a lot more than a year.
(An aside: I'm of the opinion that most of the hooroar about benighted rednecks propelling Bush into office is just as blown out of proportion as the panic coming from the people who want to move to Canada right now. But whether it is or not, my point still holds: even moderate beliefs don't change overnight.)
Do you want change? Then start with what I pointed out earlier: the world around you. Quit preaching to the choir and have real conversations with people you might not normally talk to. If you genuinely believe that Jane at the office is misguided when she says that abortion should be outlawed, don't just write her off as a fundie whack-job. Swallow your ire and talk to her. Can you find out why? Can you get her to understand the consequences of imposing those beliefs on everyone, the contradiction they pose against freedoms that she probably takes for granted? If you can do that, you've just won yourself an advocate. That advocate will talk to other advocates, and it'll spread virally from there. You know this. Every one of you, O Audience I Can Count On One Hand1, has a working understanding of memetics and how ideas spread. Why not use it, instead of trying the same tired old Madison Avenue tactics that failed in 2000 and just failed again?
Nothing is different. We live today in the same nation we lived in yesterday, where people do the same things they've done all their lives and will go on doing tomorrow.
In a big way, that's why we're in the place we're in now.
"Men go crazy in congregations; they only get better one by one." -- Gordon Sumner
1 Okay, in binary. But still.