And furthermore.... America, Thank You.

I forgot to say this, because I was so busy not gloating, but thank you America. I love you. So much.
Thank you for making me feel sane again.
Thank you for lifting this burden off my shoulders, and sharing it with me, and putting your arms around my shoulders instead.
Thanks for singing with me. Thanks for praying with me. Thanks for having faith in me when I lost faith in you.
Thanks also for crying with me, and drowning out my embarrassingly loud sobs with your own, in chorus.
But thanks mostly for letting me know I'm not only the one out there with these ideals, these hopes, these dreams. I'm not the only who cares about the sanctity of the Constitution, and common decency, and justice. I'm not the only one who can put aside self-interest and think long-term for once. I'm not the only one who's sick to death of this death culture, of war-mongering, of raped women and slaughtered children on the evening news. I'm not the only one disgusted by corporate soldiers, and real soldiers being kicked to the curb after their service, or told to shut up and go home (if they have one). Yeah, I know, it's conceited of me to even think that.
Because, and maybe I should have come clean with this earlier, I grew up in a family that was like a microcosm of the Bush Administration, with the lying, and the favoritism, and the daily injustices, and the secret addictions, and the bullying, abusive, crazy-making behavior, and the lying, and the lying, and the lying. As a result, I still have this ingrained belief that if I don't do something, take responsibility for something, it won't get done. If I didn't water the plants, they would have died. If I didn't feed and walk the dog, she would have died. If I didn't clean the whole damn house every weekend... you get the picture. So I tend to take the weight of the world on me, and shoulder all sorts of guilt and burden that isn't mine to bear. It was true in my family, it's true for my country. If I don't try and save my family, who will? If I don't try and save the world, who will? It's odd, and not entirely coincidental, for the past 8 years, we as a people have been in a very sick, co-dependent relationship with our government. And for the past 8 years, almost to the day that the Thief got sworn in, I have not spoken to my family.
Now it seems, some kind of global intervention has taken place, and everyone else woke up from the abusive, codependent denial haze sometime after I did. For some, what shook them awake was the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. For some it was the bald-faced lies told in the mainstream media to get us into this ridiculous, tragic war. For some it was Katrina. For some it was seeing a loved one come home from said war(s) broken, uncared for, and thrown away by this government. For many it was the crashing economy that took their dreams with it.
For me, it was the carpet-bombing of the American people with lie after lie and scandal after scandal that did it. At first, I was so triggered by their violence and deception, I could only duck and cover like everyone else. I could only try and take care of myself and my husband and our cat, which was hard enough to do for the first 3 years of this nightmare, anyway. I was so triggered, most of the time, I could barely catch my breath, nevermind speak out against the atrocities, or tell my story. Even the husband said, right after I'd shaved my head in protest at the Thief's 2nd stolen inauguration (and then immediately decided to get pregnant) "you seem to be taking this personally." Well, I was. That's the understatement of the decade. For me, every time the Bush Regime cranked out another whopper, like "We know Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction and he plans to use them!" right after the UN Weapons inspectors were interviewed and said, "yeah, nothing here, we got rid of them all in the 90's, like we told you" it was my psychotic, narcissist of a mother threatening to kill me, herself, and burn down the house all over again- complete with the sneering at my tears and a "you're not abused, you're a spoiled little bitch." for good measure.

So thank you America, for validating my perceptions, what I've seen with my own eyes and felt with my own heart, as real. You don't know how much that means to me.
And if you're not crying yet, just read Alice Walker's Open Letter to Barack Obama, available here http://www.theroot.com/id/48726- but even it doesn't contain the crying-est part. That you had to hear on her interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! today, Veteran's Day. Many black and other oppressed-people leaders around the globe have been calling to remind Obama that the White House was built by slaves, and how he should never forget that. For many of these people, Obama is not enough of a "grievance politician" like Jesse Jackson, one who is constantly reminding whites of the wrongs they've done, and blacks of the struggles they've been through. They know he is a transcendent of that type, and not of that type, so he needs to "remember" as a cultural descendant of American slaves, if not a strictly racial descendant of them (since his father was not descended from slaves). This gets tricky because white racists could just as easily remind Obama constantly that the White House was built by slaves, but they'd be doing it to try and belittle him or "put him in his place." As Alice does, she reframed it in her gentle, rip-your-heart-open way. She said look, the ancestors have long memories, and they also think long-term. So I think they knew, when they were building that house, that they were building it for him. They poured their loftiest dreams into the sweat that built that place, and they dreamnt of him generations before he ever arrived. They knew he would come. They knew they wouldn't see it in their lifetimes, or in their children's lifetime, or in their great-grandchildren's lifetime, but they knew he would come. That's faith.
(crying yet?)
I liken it to that old saying about Cathedral builders in Europe back in the day. It would take at least 100 years to build a good one, and workers were little better than slaves, but the honor and "glory" of doing it would be passed down for 3, 4 generations.
It also strikes a similar chord to one of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite activist heroine-moms, Winona LaDuke. She was, in turn, quoting one of her Anishinaabe elders on the struggles of Native Americans and whether or not they would ever "get there." The elder said, in a nutshell- "all this- our lands being taken away, our people diminished from disease and warfare, our people's families torn apart by poverty, drugs and crime, these past 200 or so years, all this, is but a thunderclap (and here he smacked his hands together loudly, for effect) in the history of our people."
We'll look on these past 8 years as such, amigos. I have faith. But thank you again, so much, for weathering the storm with me, and for handing me a damn umbrella when I wouldn't get out of the rain myself.

(and thanks for allowing me to officially re-christen this space as The Campfire! The Crowbar was starting to give me bad visuals.)