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For the past four years, I have felt a gamut of emotions -- rage, hopelessness, despair, encouragement, and too many more to list them all here. My faith in our system was shaken, stretched to the breaking point at times, but I still felt that the 2004 election would be a correction to the fraud and abuse of power that had begun on Dec. 12, 2000.
Waking up on Nov. 3 and finding out that Bush had actually received the majority of the popular vote, and would actually be ELECTED this time, dashed that feeling.
Now, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. I feel like the values that I hold above all others, the values I learned from my mainstream Protestant upbringing -- charity, forgiveness and compassion -- are now no longer valued by a majority of Americans. Faced with the choice between owning up to some unpleasant truths or instead burying their heads in the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism, a majority of the voting public chose the latter.
America is no longer my country. It is no longer a place where I feel welcome, where the ideals of our Founding Fathers are respected. While I still pledge to fight to re-establish these ideals, I cannot help but feel great despair and sadness at this unfortunate passing of events.
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