Vote with hope, not with fear

I walked to the polling place in my neighborhood this morning, a little more than a quarter mile down the road. I counted the Obama/Biden yard signs, which appear to be outnumbering the opponents by at least six to one. Things were smooth and orderly. I have two voting stickers - one in English and one in Spanish. It felt good to vote.

My mood alternates between elation and agonized waiting. I should go get my free coffee.

Today I need to eat all the crunchy things I won't get for weeks, try to write an LJ Idol entry, get my information for the surgery tomorrow, go to the post office, and probably do other things I have forgotten.

the only thing to do

Is to watch John Stewart and Stephen Colbert cover the election! Indecision '08!

(OMG they set Dick Gephardt on fire!!!)

LJ Idol, Week 7: Hope

I remember in 2004, watching Kerry's speech in the lunchroom at First American. I was trying to hide my tears because I worked in a very conservative office, a place where the woman serving lunch would say in all seriousness "I'm glad we are in Iraq protecting Jesus' oil!" (Honest to god, that is a real quote.) I remember the utter despair I felt in the wake of Bush's re-election and I wondered if I would ever shake that feeling.

Four years later, the world is a darker place in so many ways. But for the first time in four years, I feel like maybe things don't always have to get worse instead of better. I want to believe that a country so often riven with racial strife has done something profound by electing Barak Obama just a generation after the Civil Rights movement. I want to believe that we have voted in hope instead of fear, that we are making a change from what we have been before.

People are so often disappointing. I want so badly to believe, to be hopeful about what I think is the inherent decency of the human spirit, people doing the right thing, brotherhood and equality. I want more than anything for those things to be true, for us to rise about selfishness and ignorance to better than we are. All that idealism can feel toxic when confronted with the world. Where is hope when all we see is what has gone wrong? How can things ever be right again after so much evil? Cynicism, despair, those feelings come easy at such moments.

Hope is hard. It's much like faith, at once fragile and steely. It requires a suspension of disbelief and sacrifice, a willingness to be vulnerable and a willingness to suffer disappointments immeasurable. Hope requires a certain fearless effort to keep moving no matter the hurt, no matter the chance of failure. Hope is a choice that is not always easy. Without hope, we could not change the world and ourselves.

Nothing worth having comes without effort. To hope is to commit to believe, to dare to be greater, to be more than we are.