tom_thinks

The past few weeks have been a bit of a blur. Up until the "election" on Tuesday, I was pretty busy working with MoveOn PAC to get out the vote for Kerry, so I hadn't been reading much and definitly not blogging.Now I've piled up a lot of things I wanted to blog about, so I'll try to keep it brief.
Working with all the other volunteers here in Gainesville and our great organizers (Megan and Mark) was a great experience. It was truly inspiring to see so many people taking action to make the world a better place.
But all that work seemed to matter very little Wednesday afternoon when John Kerry conceded. I was pissed, not only did my state (FL) go to the Republicans, but then John Kerry has the nerve to quit before every last vote had been counted! He then went on to suggest building a bridge to the Republicans rather then insisting that "President" Bush was still just as bad as he had sad just yesterday. I'm still pissed, even more so now that there seems to be more evidence of election fraud (read this, this and this.) I thought we were gonna fight to the last vote, not give up in a few hours. I think that was an even bigger dissappointment then the fact that so many people were motivated to vote out of prejudice against gays and lesbians. Record numbers of people came to the polls not because they cared about the war in Iraq, the growing deficit or health care but because the idea of two men getting married offends their sense of identity. I had thought America had grown up more than that.
So after all that dissappointment I was pretty depressed. At 7pm Wed. I went to our monthly Democracy For America Meetup and that all changed. I was reminded of the great people that worked so hard on this election and their passion to see real change in this country. I was reminded that even with a Kerry victory we still would have had to fight for real progress. I was reminded that we've been defeated before and we've come a long way since then. Our meeting had almost a record turnout. Almost everyone had an idea on what to do next. The same enthusiasm we had before the election came back into us all almost instantly and now we're back.
To those of you feeling down and depressed you should get up and get out there. Think about what you did or didn't do to influence this election. What will you do about it next time? If we want to see this country change direction and take the reigns of power back from the religous right, the corporations and war mongers we don't have a day to waste. I highly recommend getting involved with Democracy For America in your area (Find a meetup) There are many other groups working towards the same goals and a bunch of them are in my sidebar.
In related news, another loss for the Democrats has got to be a signal to the top dogs in the party that they are doing something wrong. The media and of course the Republican elements inside the party (DLC) are all probably thinking of how the party can become more like the NeoCons, but we can't let them do that. We need to take this opportunity to shift the party to real progressive values and take this party off the defensive. I personally beleive that a big factor in Kerry's loss was his percieved indecisveness compared to Bush's resoluteness. While many of us realize that the world is very complex and does indeed require a great amount of studying and measuring, we can also realize that middle of the road "moderate" decisions made for political reasons are not going to inspire voters. Was anyone happy with John Kerry's "safe" position on Iraq or Gay Marraige? We need to start electing leaders with real progressive values that aren't afraid to say what they stand for. Percieved resoluteness need not work only for the Right.
Ok, I'm done, thanks for tuning in. We've all got a lot to do, a lot more than we thought, so let's get to it. Oh and I've started a new blog for Democracy For America in Gainesville, if you're interested.