On Bush leaving

[Fovea]

I was in Montreal the night of election 2000. I was there to save an international group of developers working on rather complex project from abending.

The day of the election, I was the subject of a lot of good natured ribbing. "Shouldn't you go home and vote, Yank?"
(It is somehow amusing to be called "Yank" by an Israeli with a British accent.) One of the Chinese asked if it was illegal for me to say who I voted for.

All in all, it seemed like an ordinary moment of team building, as we shared stories from our various hoods, ranging from Anhui Province, China, to authentic French Francophones.

Then I went up to the hotel bar and had a great dinner, and watched the election derail. I watched the news readers declaim over and over about the notorious unreliabliity of exit polling (!!!!!). Did I mention my minor was Poli Sci?

I went to bed full of scotch and deeply worried.

The next day the mood in the workroom (they had rented a ballroom and installed a server and about twenty workstations in it specifically for me) was quiet and frankly, gloomy. For about an hour, no work got done. I brought us back to the actual task my employer was getting paid a lot of dough for.

I said, "Look, I know this looks bad, but this is the United States, a mature Democracy under the rule of law. We have constitutional remedies for this sort of problem."
Most of the team believed me. One or two of the Chinese expressed polite scepticism about governments in general, but life went on and we went back to work.

From that moment to this has been a nightmare-- like Wilfred Owen's description of a gas attack in Dulce et Decorum Est.
America, from within our media made house of mirrors, is aenigmate, a nation seen through a glass, murkily. I know, based on the damage these eight years has piled on me that some parts will never wake up again, and that I will carry this darkness with me etched into my soul.

If I ever hear a smug pundit smarmily praising a nation as it slides into fascism and rogue nation status without breaking his jaw, beshrew me.
But for the rest of me, I rejoice! I had been certain that America was sinking into a second civil war between the know-it-alls and the knowNothings. We came So Fucking Close.
Now we must wake up, remove the haters, educate the ignorant, and dis-arm the stupid.
We have to do that first thing, because there is so much real work to do, and for this shining moment, so very much is possible.

I only wish more of my old SCA friends were here in the real world to see it.

After all that, here is my question:
How quickly are you going to get over Macho Grande?