Gone Missing

I woke up this morning and wondered who stole my country. Have you seen it?

I trusted in this election. The country would make a change. I felt it deep down, viscerally. With so many things gone wrong and so many disillusioned folks, it was time for a change. That I knew.

But I don’t know my country. I don’t understand the evangelical in Mississippi any better than I understand the anti-abortion protester in Seattle. I don’t speak the Wall Street/frat boy/I-banker language and certainly not that of the Wyoming rancher. I can’t picture a Latino in Santa Fe choosing his president based on a state-managed issue like gay marriage, just like I can’t picture a small-town Ohioan watching W speak and thinking, “Man, he’s just like one of us.”

That, according to the polls, is our country. Forget the other 48 percent. Forget the rest of us. Our president, with House and Senate majorities, already has.

Today, I feel isolated in my mind, in my ideals, in my hopes for an equal, energized and safe society. The world in which Brooke and I resided for five years—the university ideal, liberal Brooklyn, with artists and writers and the like—has sunken into the muck of more than a year of war, of tax cuts, of children left behind, of New Deal and Great Society privatization, of evil axes and videos and torture. We are left questioning what we believe, what we teach, what we know.

Politics are that way, of course. There are ebbs and flows. There is struggle and there is party dominance. There is rhetoric, and then there is action. For people like Brooke and I, there is much questioning to be done—of our beliefs, and how those compare with those of the American public; of our candidate, and how people like us decided on him; of our two-party political system, and how it sucks true choice away from voters. Mostly, though, there is shock and frustration, disappointment and disgust.

Sadly, I fear it has just begun.