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sharanWell, my attention span has been completely shot to hell today (not good when I have midterm tomorrow) and I finally decided maybe if I write up this post and get it out of my system. This is truly a dark day for America. I have never felt so ashamed of my country as I do right now. The rest of the world must have absolutely no respect for us right now. Letting him buy the election once was one thing, but electing him AGAIN? Does no one see how evil that man and his cronies are? We're stuck with a religious fanatic with an agenda in the white house for 4 more years, and now he has nothing to lose, because he can't get reelected without changing the constitution (although I wouldn't put it past him to try that). And if there's another terrorist attack the country has already proven that when people are afraid they're willing to roll over and play dead and let their rights be taken away in the name of 'security'. Look at the Patriot Act! Under the right circumstances this guy could just tell people we can't afford to have a change in leadership and suddenly elections are cancelled. He just needs people to be afraid enough to get away with it. I only hope people like Moveon.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BushRecall.org, Michael Moore, and others are able to keep watch and prevent him from going too far. My only hope is that Bush's own incompetance keeps him from getting away with much.
The stories I've been hearing about what's been going on are really scary, I just wish most people saw it. This is the man that just got relected:
http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=87&t=30089
This is an actual article printed in the NY Times and reposted on another site where you don't have to log in to read it (I checked the NY Times link and it WAS valid. Thank God not ALL the major media is in the Republicans back pocket!). It summarizes a lot of what I've been picking up from various news sources. It's long, but very worth reading.
I was talking to my brother recently and he said "Worst case scenario is he's out in 4 years." and I said, "No, WORST case scenario is we're living in Nazi Germany in 4 years", and unfortunately that's true. BEST case scenario now is he's out in 4 years and we only have to deal with the decades it'll take to recover from the debt and the loss of rights from the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II if he manages to get that one through (and from what I heard that one makes the first one look like a walk in the park in comparison). All that would take is another terrorist attack. Hopefully after 200 years this country has enough constitutional protections that it won't get to that worst case scenario, but we already have camps where some nasty things are going on and a lot of people just ignore what's going on because they're Arabs and they must be terrorists, so it's O.K. Well, just because it's not you does NOT make it O.K., since you might be next. Maybe I'm just ultra-sensitive to it after years of getting it drilled into my head in Hebrew school to always remember the Holocaust and NEVER let it happen again. But it seems to me that too many people have the "Oh, it'll never happen here" syndrome, and that itself scares me since I'm sure people were saying the same thing in Germany.
I'm not saying this will definitely happen. Maybe we'll get lucky and in 4 years he'll be gone without too much damage and life will go on and we'll recover. This country has recovered from a lot. But I'm going to be watching carefully and when I finish at USC if things look really bad I'll be giving serious thought to leaving the country (I hear Australia is nice).
I'm not looking to start any political arguments here (and have no time to get into them) so please don't try to start any here. I'm just venting. I considered making this friends only but I'd like to think we still have freedom of speech in this country. Being anti-Bush is not a crime (at least not yet). But as a science fiction reader/writer I think maybe I look at what might happen in the future more than most people in this country (who probably don't look beyond what they're doing the next weekend) and what I see really scares me.
I really hoped that with Michael Moore/Farenheit 911, Howard Stern, MoveOn.org, BushRecall.org, and everyone else speaking against Bush there was hope for the election. I've heard even many Republicans have been turning against him and were planning on voting for Kerry. But I guess it wasn't enough. And I won't even get into the nasty stuff going on behind this election (see Michael Moore's site for posts by people talking about mysteriously getting kicked off the voting rolls, millions of absentee ballots getting 'lost' in the mail, particularly to registered Democrats, people in Florida selecting Kerry on the voting machines and checking the confirmation screens and finding Bush was marked down as their choice, etc., not to mention the group currently being investigated for having voter registration drives and allegedly detroying the cards for people who register as Democrats) because even with all that happening enough people voted for him that I'm not sure it would have made that much of a difference even if we did have a fair election. For me the real problem is that it was that close to begin with!
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, hopefully getting that out of my system will help my concentration, if not maybe I'll go play Dance Dance Revolution on my new PS2 (a birthday present from my roommate:)) for an hour. I've finally found a good way to get exercise, and DDR extreme for PS2 actually has The Reflex by Duran Duran and some other 80s music. Space Channel 5 is fun too on the dance pad.
Well, I better go call my father (it's his birthday) so I'm ending this now. BTW, I have been so swamped with my classes I haven't checked in at all here in a long time. I'm probably going to be taking yet another day off work during the week because I'm not happy with my math grades so far. But at least I'm doing well in my other classes! I just finished a homework from Hell (emulating an ant colony) for my Data Structures class and I now have a midterm in that class tomorrow and ANOTHER homework due monday. it never ends. So I probably won't be able to check in here again for a while. *sigh*
Update: I decided to spare people and lj-cut the long rant.
The stories I've been hearing about what's been going on are really scary, I just wish most people saw it. This is the man that just got relected:
http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=87&t=30089
This is an actual article printed in the NY Times and reposted on another site where you don't have to log in to read it (I checked the NY Times link and it WAS valid. Thank God not ALL the major media is in the Republicans back pocket!). It summarizes a lot of what I've been picking up from various news sources. It's long, but very worth reading.
I was talking to my brother recently and he said "Worst case scenario is he's out in 4 years." and I said, "No, WORST case scenario is we're living in Nazi Germany in 4 years", and unfortunately that's true. BEST case scenario now is he's out in 4 years and we only have to deal with the decades it'll take to recover from the debt and the loss of rights from the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II if he manages to get that one through (and from what I heard that one makes the first one look like a walk in the park in comparison). All that would take is another terrorist attack. Hopefully after 200 years this country has enough constitutional protections that it won't get to that worst case scenario, but we already have camps where some nasty things are going on and a lot of people just ignore what's going on because they're Arabs and they must be terrorists, so it's O.K. Well, just because it's not you does NOT make it O.K., since you might be next. Maybe I'm just ultra-sensitive to it after years of getting it drilled into my head in Hebrew school to always remember the Holocaust and NEVER let it happen again. But it seems to me that too many people have the "Oh, it'll never happen here" syndrome, and that itself scares me since I'm sure people were saying the same thing in Germany.
I'm not saying this will definitely happen. Maybe we'll get lucky and in 4 years he'll be gone without too much damage and life will go on and we'll recover. This country has recovered from a lot. But I'm going to be watching carefully and when I finish at USC if things look really bad I'll be giving serious thought to leaving the country (I hear Australia is nice).
I'm not looking to start any political arguments here (and have no time to get into them) so please don't try to start any here. I'm just venting. I considered making this friends only but I'd like to think we still have freedom of speech in this country. Being anti-Bush is not a crime (at least not yet). But as a science fiction reader/writer I think maybe I look at what might happen in the future more than most people in this country (who probably don't look beyond what they're doing the next weekend) and what I see really scares me.
I really hoped that with Michael Moore/Farenheit 911, Howard Stern, MoveOn.org, BushRecall.org, and everyone else speaking against Bush there was hope for the election. I've heard even many Republicans have been turning against him and were planning on voting for Kerry. But I guess it wasn't enough. And I won't even get into the nasty stuff going on behind this election (see Michael Moore's site for posts by people talking about mysteriously getting kicked off the voting rolls, millions of absentee ballots getting 'lost' in the mail, particularly to registered Democrats, people in Florida selecting Kerry on the voting machines and checking the confirmation screens and finding Bush was marked down as their choice, etc., not to mention the group currently being investigated for having voter registration drives and allegedly detroying the cards for people who register as Democrats) because even with all that happening enough people voted for him that I'm not sure it would have made that much of a difference even if we did have a fair election. For me the real problem is that it was that close to begin with!
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, hopefully getting that out of my system will help my concentration, if not maybe I'll go play Dance Dance Revolution on my new PS2 (a birthday present from my roommate:)) for an hour. I've finally found a good way to get exercise, and DDR extreme for PS2 actually has The Reflex by Duran Duran and some other 80s music. Space Channel 5 is fun too on the dance pad.
Well, I better go call my father (it's his birthday) so I'm ending this now. BTW, I have been so swamped with my classes I haven't checked in at all here in a long time. I'm probably going to be taking yet another day off work during the week because I'm not happy with my math grades so far. But at least I'm doing well in my other classes! I just finished a homework from Hell (emulating an ant colony) for my Data Structures class and I now have a midterm in that class tomorrow and ANOTHER homework due monday. it never ends. So I probably won't be able to check in here again for a while. *sigh*
Update: I decided to spare people and lj-cut the long rant.
