America, you let me down. I am ashamed and disappointed.

When Bush hadn’t been elected, I could believe that we would right ourselves, that we would show the world that we are better than we were. That this morning, I would wake up from this long nightmare, and we could begin to work to correct our mistakes.

Now, we have a President who has been legitimately elected, supposedly (I still have genuine suspicions that Diebold gave Bush the election). Even after Iraq, even after his utterly incompetant mishandling of every single piece of policy he has touched, we elected him. And when I say “we,” I don’t include me, I don’t include my friends, and I don’t include any educated, rational, thinking individual with a conscience. But apparently, there’s not enough of us out there to counter the irrational retarded fucks who turned out in droves this time.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that now, we have shown the world our true colors. We have shown them that we are a nation run on blind ideology, fear, hatred, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry, and zealotry. We are, in effect, no different than the religious ideologues of the Middle East. Except we’re better armed.

I don’t understand what happened. I’ve been grappling with it all morning, but I’m no closer to a conclusion. Part of me thinks that Diebold has this grand and very clever scheme of sneaking fraudulent votes into appropriate places – popular vote swings in California, which would go unnoticed because the state would end overwhelmingly Kerry, while critical votes would change to Bush in Florida, and could go uncontested because the popular vote margin had been jiggered in such a way that would make such a result believable. And with no paper trail, no one would ever know. I don’t doubt that this happened. I can’t prove it, either, so I can only hold on to this hope that this election is the actions of a few truly evil people – it’s the only optimistic outlook I have at this point.

We can’t be a nation that’s comprised of 51% intellectually and morally vacant idiot. We just can’t. And yet, here we are. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I’m sitting here with a plate of shit stew in front of me, with nothing left to do but chow down. I don’t even know what to do now. The democratic machine *worked* this time. Voter turnout was tremendous. People were energized, they were on the ground, volunteers who’d never been interested in politics before were moved to get involved. *I* got involved. Everyone I know – literally *EVERYONE* I know got involved, in some fashion or another, even if it was just actively talking about the issues at hand. Sure, we’re in California, where people are actually relatively sane, in the metropolitan areas. But still. The rest of the country can’t be that ignorant, can it?

It would seem they can. It would seem that fear is stronger than hope, that willful ignorance is more powerful than knowledge. It is harder to be smart than it is to be dumb, and it is harder to change, than it is to stay the same. I just don’t know what to do. Can we educate the masses? Can we force the media to be *responsible* again? Can we convince more than forty million people that it’s worth it to think? I don’t know. I don’t think so. People want to just live their lives, for the most part, and people who haven’t learned to think simply aren’t going to change. How did we get this way? How can we change?

And then there’s the question, is it worth it? It’d be so much easier to live somewhere I can be proud of. It’d be so much easier to write off America as a nation of ignorant, lazy bastards that isn’t even worth considering anymore. But I was born here. I grew up here. I love this country as much as anyone else, and it’s my right as much as anyone else’s to want to be proud of this country. Just because a bunch of ignorant fucktards have stolen my country from me doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to fight back.