Monday, November 3, 2008

The Night Before Election No One was Stirring...

I feel like the world is holding its collective breath. It bustles around me and yet I can’t focus, can’t really sit still. Is everyone feeling the same way? On the surface it wouldn’t seem if anything momentous was taking place, but underneath there is a little tension. Jokes are strained. One of my coworkers agreed that he was all nerves and little attention span.

Since I wrote the first paragraph I have had the same conversation over and over again with plenty of lame jokes about emigrating if things don’t go well. I just want it all to be over and start to work on whatever is coming next. I want to be celebrating life instead of holding my breath. I want to feel my creativity well up inside me and share it with people. I want to see a little optimism around me because whatever party you vote for the deep and abiding fact is that we are still a fortunate people, us Americans, for the standard of living we, most of us, have, and the freedoms that we have come to take for granted.

I want to start the healing and the return to the faith of our founders in a free society of equals. Of course I understand that their definition was a little different from mine. I get the differences between their mindset and mine, but fundamentally I still feel proud when I read the stirring words of Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —


If you haven’t read the Declaration of Independence you should – and if you have you should reread it. It’s an incredible document and can be as stirring today as the day it was first penned.

3 comments:

Shakti said...

I'm an American ex-pat living in the UK and I feel the same way. Actually lots of people here, as well as the rest of the world, feel the same. I'm quite nervous today. The world is tired of living in fear, of watching hard earned liberties being stripped away again, and feeling helpless and hopeless. There's a feeling of hope and forward motion again. If it's defeated...well, I just don't want to think about the consequences.

High Desert Diva said...

Wonderful post.

Longfellow said...

Thank you. I'm still feeling very jumpy. I have to head to the polls soon. I'm crossing my fingers and toes.