I wrote this listening to the returns come in, and
watching your faces...

2 Nov 2004- There are few and far between the days in our lives that feel pivotal in the living of them. Mostly days of import are made in hindsight.

In reflection, in revision.

It is seldom when the present moments of our lives, reverberate with an energy that we know, will shape our days to come.

Nov 2 2004 for me was one such day. One of more than a few presidential elections I have participated in, standing in front of my polling place, I felt that sense of... history, as wave after wave of people came. Felt it as the numbers of the day raced past the normal apathetic 300+ turnout at that precinct, raced by 600+ by early afternoon, and made a mad dash to 4 digits by close of polls.

Felt it as the tides and times of people rolled past me. Felt it in the people I worked with, spoke with, laughed with, and in rare cases debated with. This sense of history.
Felt it in the afterparty, when the polls closed. As, in an old converted library, I sat surrounded by Green party candidates and volunteers; and felt the energy of a battle well waged.

Listening on an old rickety, rabit-eared 14" TV; to the local and national results come in. Listening to a medium people no longer trust, tell us results we no longer quite believe.

I sat in this room and watched people of all creed and color; watched them laugh and joke, worry and hope. And there was a victory in that... oddly seperate from the suspect results, a victory that can not be, bartered, or traded, or televised away.

Perhaps the most lasting victory lived in that room, a victory of people, ordinary people, changing the face of the world... one person at a time. Changing the face of politics from a dirty word, that is priced beyond the means of all but the venal and the vile; to this oddly comforting notion of a party of the people, by the people, and for the people.

I sat in that room, listening to this opposition, and that opposition, with a fraction of the poll results in, declare themselves victorious, and I had the odd need to smile.

Because the opposition, for all their money, and all their conniving, and all their grasping, and all their claims, did not feel to me like victors. I fear not even to themselves. They felt like a desperate party, that must fabricate,or buy, or steal the winning.

They felt to me like frightened old cannibals, in the last days before consuming themselves.
No, the victory of that night, regardless of what a bought media shouts, was in that room, with these beautiful people, [young and not so young, boastful and benign, belligerant and benevolent] making history, one person at a time. It was in this room, with these last American patriots, speaking to a world dying for change, of changes coming; and speaking to a world dying of apathy, of apathy ending.

It felt like history, no... it felt like legend at
last... unfurled.

Victory made by fine young patriots, true patriots, who love America enough to tell her when she's wrong, help her to be right. Fine young patriots... changing a Totalitarian America.... saving an occupied America... one person at a time.


Nov 2 2004, A beginning.