Is the nightmare really over?

11/9/2006

Perhaps at last we are waking up from what has frequently and accurately been called our long national nightmare.  The landslide Democratic victory on Tuesday seems almost to good to be true.

I've heard it said that liberals like me are out celebrating, and I guess some are, but I must confess to being still in shock.  I feel mentally and emotionally traumatized by the Bush administration, like the victim of some violent crime.

Starting two days before the election, I began having severe anxiety.  What if another election was stolen?  What if in spite of the fervent desire for change that I felt all around me, and that had been expressed in nationwide polls, our democracy was just too broken for change to happen?

I just bought a lovely new home in Baltimore, Maryland.  What if after the election, I just wanted to sell that home and flee for Europe or New Zealand, as I had been tempted to do many times in the past few years?

Moving to Baltimore had been the result of the difficult and lengthy process of giving up my home in California and figuring out where I would like to live and where I could now afford to live.  That process had begun because of a workplace injury, the realization that our once excellent social safety net no longer functions (due to Republican policies), and the resulting need to cash in the equity in my beloved California home. 

I had, as former Senator John Edwards used to say in his famous Two Americas speech, "fallen off a cliff."  I used to have quite a good job, and California real estate had become very pricey since I bought my house, so maybe it wasn't quite the same high and deadly cliff that so many others have fallen over, but it was a cliff just the same. Like so many others, when Edwards talked about it back in 2004, I never thought it could happen to me.

Adding significantly to my anxiety during this period of change, the theft by the Bush administration of so many of our civil liberties had made me wonder whether the America I believed in even still existed.  I didn't want to move to another country, but I thought very seriously about it.

Another country might make health care available.  Another country might care about human rights.  Another country might have democratic elections.  In other words, another country might be in some way like the America I once thought we had, or so I hoped.

I bought the home in Baltimore on the gamble that America could come back.  What if I was wrong?

There I was, a couple days before the election, letting the terror of it all sink in.  What was at stake in the election, for me, was both my new physical home in Baltimore and my mental, emotional, and spiritual home in the United States of America. 

I didn't know if our democracy still functioned.  I didn't know if we could get the rule of law and our Constitution back.  I didn't know if the America whose political life I had participated in throughout my own life, and which my ancestors fought for over 200 years ago, still existed at all.

Those few days before the election, and on election day, I really sweated.  Election night, I stayed up until 3 a.m. watching the returns on the Internet, counting and agonizing over each seat in the House and Senate, praying for a new Congress that would lead us in the right direction.

I'm delighted and relieved at the outcome, but I know that it is only one tiny step away from the brink of national oblivion.  I know that the Bush administration has hurt our country so severely that this is only the beginning of a protracted battle to set it right.  Yet, it is a step in the right direction, and for that I'm grateful.  There is such a staggering amount of work to do to restore the America I believe in.  I don't feel like celebrating yet.