I’m feeling politically antsy again. I’m at a particularly annoying stage where I’m aware that I’m not as informed as I could be, but also where the getting more informed is sort of killing me. Everything I read about is freaking me out: the Swift Boat Veterans; the National Guard memos; the convention bounce; the lack of convention bounce; loyalty oaths at political rallies; “fair and balanced;” Cheney’s assertion that if we vote for Kerry WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE and Miller’s assertion that, you know, it should be illegal to run against the president because it’s just not FAIR; Vietnam; assault weapons; environmental degradation; voter fraud and those weird voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail; war and pillage and “catastrophic success”; flip-flopping; all of it, all of it. I am freaking out.
I get mad at the Republicans for obfuscation and prevarication and because they started a war on my birthday. I get mad at the Democrats for letting the Republicans run them and playing nicey-nicey and pretty much guaranteeing their own defeat by allowing a forty-year-old war to determine what the issues in this election are. I get mad at myself for not taking a leave of absence from my job for the next month and a half and devoting my time to making animal sacrifices with real goats and everything if only this man doesn’t get in again. I’m mad at how our political system works, in that my choices for electing The Most Powerful Man In The World are narrowed down to Mind-Numbingly Frightening vs. Less So, We Think. I’m angry at everyone else who doesn’t think the way I do and doesn’t see things from my perspective, and then I get angry that I’m not angry enough about this, and then I get concerned that maybe I am becoming the type of person who puts self-righteous bumper stickers on her car. Sometimes I worry I’m too liberal and other times I worry I’m not liberal enough. I also worry that I don’t really know what’s going on and that I would think completely differently about everything if I really did know what’s really going on. I sort of despise myself for living in a little bubble where everyone wears sensible shoes and has potlucks and believes in legalizing marijuana and universal health care, and I also despise myself for being very very comfortable in that bubble because it doesn’t really require anything of me. I often think I should turn this site into some sort of political blog but then I think that that would be pretty pathetic because then every entry would be like this one is, and also I’d never get my breakup CDs made.
I’ve been trying to challenge this freaked-out-ness by trying to get a little more involved in the vast world outside my head, and frankly, it’s not going well. I went to a MoveOn PAC meeting on Tuesday that was vaguely helpful in that it allowed me to sign up to do some telephone bank and fundraiser stuff in the next couple of weeks, but I also felt like I could have just done that online and saved myself the hot sweatiness of the meeting room and its stench of cheery desperation. I tried to go to a candlelight vigil last night, too, to commemorate everyone who’s died in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that too was sort of a wash. It was mostly my own fault because I didn’t bring my own candle (I thought candles would be provided!) and because I didn’t want to walk around the lake in the dark by myself. I stood at the edge for a while and watched the few people who had remembered their candles walk by and tried to feel anything by vast inchoate helplessness. I’ve made my donations and I’m registered to vote and I’m volunteering but it still doesn’t feel like enough, it’s never ever enough. What am I supposed to do, move to Canada? Am I supposed to sit through four more years of this country getting scarier and scarier (and, by extension, becoming scarier and scarier my ownself if my brain keeps going on and on the way it has been)? Am I supposed to just keep my head in the sand of the political desert, where no one is held accountable for the right things, where yes means no and where we get peace through strength? Am I being naﶥ by cherishing the thought that things can be different, that we can really live up to our potential as a nation? And most importantly, what I can I do about all this?