defeatist optimism

i can't. i can't even think about it right now. so it looks as though i'll write about it instead. about how bitterly disappointed i am to live in a country that is so egotistical, so globally isolated, so closed-minded, so stupid as to have reelected bush as president. this election, on top of everything else, has made me feel so utterly hopeless. like i want to give in and either move away to a saner, more logical country that doesn't believe in and incorporate every thought and skewed ideal spoon fed to them by the media like a bunch of mindless fools or maybe i'll just forget it all and stay in bed for a long, long time.

its strange to live your entire life feeling proud to be american. proud of your country and what it stands for. then to one day finally grow up. to think for yourself and see that what you'd always believed in is nothing more than a bunch of horseshit. horseshit that the majority of americans seem to prefer to wallow in rather than thinking beyond what they can hear and touch and see in their limited experience. so here we are, caught in our own self-made, self-righteous bubble of ignorance and i'm stuck outside. happy to be out but feeling lost just the same. feeling like i'm out of touch with the pulse of my country and not knowing how or when it happened. realizing that i've lived in my own self-created bubble of another sort. and now i want to just give up and leave this nation to progress (or maybe its regress) towards the bleak future it seems to want.

then again, even though i'm feeling alone and hopeless, it turns out that almost one half of this country is feeling exactly the same way. i've gotten e-mails form moveon.org, greenpeace, and even john kerry himself in the past couple of days. form letters sent out to thousands, maybe millions of people. nothing meant especially for me. even so, a specific part of the greenpeace letter really got to the heart of how i feel right now and knowing that it was just a mass e-mail didn't take away from its power to bring me back from that hopelessness. in fact, it was that characteristic alone that made me feel better. to feel like maybe i'm not as out of touch with reality as i thought. if that form letter seemed to speak out to the core of my disillusionment so precisely it meant that that disillusionment is something i share with the millions of others who received the same e-mail. glory be and hallelujah! check it out, i'm not alone in my misery after all. i've got half the country right there with me. what a beautiful thing. not that i want you all to feel as miserable as i do, but its just the place we're all starting from, not necessarily where we'll end up.

"When you listen to President Bush and feel disenfranchised, when you feel like your government doesn't represent you, when you feel like it is no longer your country, savor that feeling. Before Gandhi, King, Lewis, Parks, Muir and Thoreau went on to do great things, they all felt that way. They felt it, it made them angry, and then it motivated them. Now it's our turn. Feel pissed off. Then together we will turn it into something...We all need to spend some time being pissed off. Feeling shock. Mourning. Then we have to act. Our cause is just. We can not afford to be defeated, or to be defeatist."
John Passacantando,Executive Director, Greenpeace

for some added perspective on the division of this country:
http://www.boingboing.net/images/Purple-USA.jpg