Thursday, November 09, 2006

Digesting the Election Results



It's quite difficult to do, this getting used to the world being turned upside down in a minor way, and I see a fairly desperate attempt to explain that nothing has really changed even though everything has changed. The truth is something in the middle, of course. We still live in the Bush reign, he is still going to decide on the foreign policy of this country, but it will now be more difficult to stomp on the Constitution, and the general brakes of this country have been fixed. And those brakes are certainly needed, because we need accountability and oversight and real debates in the Congress. The Republicans refused to have the Democrats in any of these debates, refused bipartisanship. So we had one party in power everywhere, and within that party its extreme wing ran most things, trying to make wild and impossible delusions into reality.

That was the faith-based reality. The real reality wasn't budged by any of those wishes, and the consequences were very bad. The reason I'm elated with the election results is not because they would be good for people who think like I do (which they may or may not be), but because they are good for the country and for the world at least in a band-aid sense, and this sense is not to be belittled. A band-aid stuck in at the right time can staunch a bleeding which unattended can kill a civilization.

That's how far I've managed to digest the results.