es martes ya? = is it tuesday yet???

I've had this icon for over two years, and it has NEVER been more appropriate as it has been this week, as my ostrich-brain is hiding in House, to avoid obsessing about the election.

It's become, as it is for so many people I know, the city of LA, you guys, everyone in my family, everyone on Facebook, almost unbelievable that this election is here, that it's so soon, that we're going to have a black president, people! We're -- I can't even find the words in English. We're going to have a Democrat! Finally! We're going to (with any luck, and I refuse to think negatively on this point) have a Congressional majority -- maybe even 2/3! In 77 days this might be our country again, in the words of Senator Obama: We are the change we've been waiting for. (Provided we rock out tomorrow in force and in numbers, but that's for when I'm phone banking -- here I'm preaching to [largely] the choir.)

If I come back here at midnight tomorrow, if it's bad news, and read what I wrote above, there's no question I'm collapsing into a font of tears. Then again, I'd be doing that anyway. And what's more, I'm entitled. We're entitled. We've been raging against the machine for eight years. We're frustrated, we're angry, and we're tired. And I don't care if Sarah Palin thinks our reward is in heaven -- I don't believe in heaven. I believe in people. I want our reward tomorrow, for all we've been through.

I don't have a job; I can't afford my health care; I couldn't afford my car; my rights have been systematically stripped away; the government's tapping phones now; freedom of speech and freedom of association are artifacts we're going to tell our kids about with wistful nostalgia; we're building a fence between the US and Mexico(that one always pisses me off the most. Has anyone seen that Ford commercial that ran maybe a year ago, with the strummy American music as sons and fathers in their pickup trucks drive down to build their part of the fence to the tune of "we're real Americans" or something similarly nauseating?); the world hates us; the dollar sucks; trust, freedom, progressiveness and prosperity are gone in the face of fear-mongering and bigotry, and for eight long years the Republican party almost managed to convince the world that evolution and global warming were myths but that marriage somehow needed protection. Anyway -- this is all to say, we're entitled to some legitimate, stunned, defeated shock if Obama doesn't win tomorrow. Sometimes I even think, "what if this isn't my country? What if I'm the one who's wrong, un-American? What if this is the puritanical Christian conservative anti-science white heterosexual NIMBY country they've been trying to tell us it is for eight years?"

But then again, there's still that audacity of hope.

Which brings me back to my earlier statement: Tomorrow we will elect our first black president, a statesman and a Democrat with a sincere desire to undo the damage that's been done over the last eight years and restore this country to a progressive, diplomatic, prosperous nation worthy of global respect. We WILL (she said, audaciously). We're only 24 hours away.

Aren't you strangely excited for a generation from now when we get to tell the kids we were here?

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YES, we MOTHERFUCKING *CAN.*