tammytoes

I am hours away from being on a Costa Rican beach, so it’s hard for me to summon anything more eloquent than glee. Thanksgiving is on the horizon, too, and I feel that despite some of the rough spots, I have so much to be thankful for, including all of you wonderful friends. I won’t be posting at all in the coming week, but I will have stories when I return. In the meantime, let me share something far more eloquent than I could ever write on the subject of life, happiness, and friendship. Much love.

“For if it be true Nature at certain moments seems charged with a presentiment of one individual lot, must it not also be true that she seems unmindful, unconscious of another? For there is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different: what wonder that Nature’s mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of – to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.”

I’m in massive pre-vacation inertia. I want to eat all the time and I can’t stay focused. Blehahyah!

As promised, here are some things you can do. Right at your computer. Let’s start with the petitions, move to the organizing, get the asses of our 49% plus on the ground, and start taking back the country in 2006. But here are some things you can do on your Wednesday evening. Big hugs and kissed to you all.

Sign the nomandate.org petition and tell the major media outlets to stop kissing Bush’s ass about his “mandate.” 3% is a margin of error, not a mandate.

Sign up at the Planned Parenthood Action Network and get your name on correspondence to protect reproductive rights.

Ditto for Naral’s Pro-Choice America Campaigns.

Head over to moveon.org’s web site and sign a petition for Congress to investigate voting integrity.

If you’re in Colorado, you can sign civilrightsnow.org’s petition for marriage equality.

If you’re a mother, you can join the MOB (Mothers Opposing Bush) and lobby like crazy for your kids.

More to come in the future, along with non-political blogs. Although that’s hard to do right now.

Words

by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

I saw a woman walking away from a gas station this morning dressed in a bathrobe, holding a can of gasoline. I wondered: snubbed lover?

Have you been to www.sorryeverybody.com yet? It’s mesmorizing, really.

Parts of my lip and chin are still numb. Can you believe it? Some days I can’t. I continue to take B-12 and wonder what it’s doing to the rest of my nerves. Perhaps one day if I’m sitting on a street corner with a tin-foil hat, friends will be able to say, “Well, we knew she shouldn’t be taking all of that damn vitamin B-12.”

I learned today that several pharmacists across the country are declining to fill prescriptions for birth control pills because of religious reasons. Is this my country? There’s now a “Pharmacists for Life” group that’s lobbying to protect pharmacists who won’t dispense or fill prescriptions from their employers – who might, shockingly enough, be upset with employees who deny to complete orders for customers. WTF? How about joining a “Pharmacists For Doing Their Fucking Job and Dispensing Legal Medication Prescribed By A Physician” group? Now that makes rational sense. Oh, I’m sorry, I was talking about rational people.

Good Night.

Okay. The bad news is the news that we all know already. I’m not going to spin positively. But here’s the thing: we can’t shut down, we can’t roll over, and we can’t get bogged down in any sort of progressive malaise. We have two years to take back Congress, so we better get crackin’. We have four years to take back the White House, and we’re going to need all of that time. In addition, find out what YOU can do about what you care about most and add it to your To-Do list. I’ll add things here as I can.

Now let me put away my soapblogbox, and I’d like to share that amidst all of the bad, bad, badness of the past week, there was much that made me very happy. Here, in no particular order.

$4.50 pitchers of PBR and big, natural laughs. solidarity. an old friend named Wendy and her new dog named Ruby. enchiladas. new luggage. thrift stores. new bikinis. friendly neighbors and neighbors who are friends. rovidica. funny teenagers. pineapple pizza. a clean apartment. friends to cry with on the phone. kenyon college. ray’s big hair. chicken and waffles. halloween costumes. peaceful patriotic purple dinosaurs for kerry.

it seems like a short list, but it really made a big difference. all the difference.

I’ve woken up from several days of drinking, trying to get out the vote, and eating bad food to a nightmare: the idiot king reigns.

Let me first make an observation about the next four years of Republican leadership that might be the only possible silver lining to this dark cloud: they can’t hide. We can, we should, and we MUST hold the administration accountable over the next four years. The Supreme Court, Civil Rights, the financial health of this country – all of them will be thrust into the spotlight over the next few years and there will be no excuses, no one else to blame. If Kerry had won, he would have been savaged by the hard-liners and conservatives who believed that things were fine before he took office. It will become all-too-clear in the next few years that things were not going fine, and with any luck, any luck at all, they will wake up horrified at the Frankenstein monster they have created. I only hope that all of those new voters who we called, cajoled, and made promises to about their votes making difference will sometime believe us again.

A few more things I’d like to say:

1. I am very sad. So sad. After the events of 9/11, I believed that Dubya would have a tragically easy path to re-election. In the past few months, I invested so much hope and energy in the opposite. When Kerry was nominated, I thought he didn’t have a chance. But to have come THIS close hurts so much.

2. We will never be the United States of anything again. Look at the electoral map. All of the blue states are on the coasts, at the boundaries, as if liberals of this country have moved themselves to the fringes, preparing to leave. Yes, there are liberals and smart moderates in all states of the union, but they are outnumbered. And they don’t breed enough to make up the difference. [Note, too, that the Texas Board of Education is considering adopting public school textbooks that preach abstinence only, with no mention of contraception. Given that Texas buys so many books that it is the national education standard for public school textbooks, if they approve these books, we can count on a whole hell of a lot MORE social conservatives being bred, indoctrinated, and raised.] More than that, there is practically nothing Dubya can do to bring Kerry supporters back to the fold. Nothing.

3. In 11 states, gays have constitutionally lost the right to marry. In 8 of those, gay partnerships have lost ANY AND ALL possible legal statuses and protections. I can’t even write more than that because it’s so frightening to me that such a large voter bloc would turn out to deny dignity and basic rights to a group of people.

4. Which brings me to the next point: Dubya won because voters believe God is on his side. “Moral values” carried the day. Here’s the economic reality: the gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots continues to grow larger. But the GOP can bridge that gap with God – plain and simple. Nevermind that evangelicals and social conservatives are BAD READERS, stupid dumb misinterpreters of the very text that they hold sacred. They believe there is a Christian mission to this country, and it’s a brand of religious nationalism that should be frightening, absolutely mortifying and shocking to ourselves. It’s a brand of religious fervor that cuts across the economic divide of the country. It’s scary. It already is to the rest of the world.

5. I was called a “babykiller” two times during this election while showing my support for Kerry/Edwards. Here’s the thing: reproductive rights and women’s health now hang in the balance and we need to prepare ourselves for a big fight over the next four years. I’m getting ready for it, and I’m not going to stop at anything. I am categorically unapologetic about being pro-choice because of one thing: women should have unequivocal rights to do whatever they want with their bodies. Period.

6. Speaking of women, I guess that “Security Moms” have spoken. And I guess they’ve spoken to the level of privilege and insularity that they hold dear – after all, they obviously don’t care about the health and well-being of other women or other women’s kids.

7. Finally, the worst part of all of this awfulness is that Dubya fucking STOLE the election four years ago. He had it handed to him on a silver platter by the Supreme Court. By the logic the GOP was using to demand Kerry concede the election this morning, Dubya should have conceded Florida four years ago and given the election to Gore. But he didn’t. And now that 3.5 million people have given him the popular vote this year, he is vindicated for his actions four years ago. QED. What a bastard.

And now that the holidays are upon us, we will be the United States of Shopping. One nation united in consumerism, and let’s put the election behind us and wear a stupid happy grin. Fuck that.

Stay with me, blog readers. Don’t lose hope. I know the sadness and malaise that we will be drawn into, I know how crappy you feel. I’ve spent hours on the phone shouting about this with people already this morning. But let’s isolate the issues we must win during the next four years and let’s get out there and make sure the fuckers don’t take away more than they have. Let’s make sure they don’t put any more young people in harm’s way unncessarily. Let’s preserve the rights we have left. And more importantly – let’s continue to build the community of friendship and inclusion and trust that we have built for ourselves among each other. Small pockets of hope and tolerance. We can build those. Any maybe over the next four years we can build enough of them to make the difference.