Oh, Canada! Or Why-oh Why-oh Did Bush Take Ohio?

I suspect it all came down to moralism. At a time when we are suffering a record deficit, when unemployment hasn’t recovered from the first couple of years of Bush’s presidency, when Bush sells himself on an education program he won’t fund, when he starts a war for dubious reasons with a military he underfunds, when he removes any environmental and employment standards from corporations, when he hands these corporations huge tax breaks to diminish their work forces or move elsewhere, when he spends so much of his time on vacation so that he misses warnings that the country will be attacked, when we lose more and more of our civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, Bush seems to have won reelection on the looming threat of consensual adult sexuality. Ann Richards could have told us this would happen.
I spent the hours leading up to the election watching a few movies—Outfoxed (about Fox News), Unconstitutional (about the Patriot Act), Bush’s Brain (about Karl Rove), and Control Room (about al Jazeera). I had been following the polls, which pretty well represented the outcome, but I thought that somehow the wealth of books, articles, films, and radio programming detailing the abuses of this administration would have reached enough people to make them outraged at the past four years. I wore my favorite shirt of the past few months, which simply says “Vote Dem,” and walked into the local middle school to do so. “Sir, you need to button up your shirt,” hissed an elderly woman behind the tables. I actually didn’t know it was a crime. Kerry for President, Kernan for governor. Our state has had issues with property taxes, but to me it amounts to the state making up for the huge federal tax cuts. I don’t mind funding things that are important. By about midnight, I felt like throwing up.
I started wondering about available employment in Canada (anyone have any feedback on this?). I also wondered again why we don’t have a more representative electoral system. I wondered why I was still casting my vote on an old-school punch card and whether we could trust its electronic replacement (after hearing several stories of machines arriving with 2000 votes for Bush already). I knew that those standing in lines for hours in Ohio who received paper ballots so that they wouldn’t have to stand there any longer would never have their votes counted. I trembled and still do at the thought of a one-party government: the Republicans of course have the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and probably several Supreme Court appointments.
I spent the next day, perhaps unprofessionally, venting to my students. I told them of my t-shirt incident, and a student said, “They told me to cover my shirt, too,” and showed me his “F@*k Bush” shirt. A few students told me about their own voting irregularities, such as a machine not taking any of their votes except for president. Some students grumbled about Bush’s reelection, others told me that John Kerry shot himself to receive his purple hearts (a very interesting and dangerous approach to notoriety). The right-wing echo machine gets around so that one can hear the same lines anywhere there’s a Fox News channel or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast, the facts be damned. So if all our jobs aren’t outsourced, if we’re not all drinking large amounts of arsenic, if haven’t been drafted into several new wars, I guess the thing to do is keep the pace of involvement we have attained and volunteer whatever we can regularly to MoveOn.org, Sojourners, the Democratic party, or whatever one can comfortably align oneself with.