the cinnamon peeler's wife

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry" (A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway)

i can't express today. as i sit in ohio, i will use other people's words (if you said these things to me, thank you. please excuse me for sharing your words, but you all really helped me through today.)

"I walked out this morning and the sun was shining. I felt better. The wind was clear and crisp. I felt better. I cried all night - big searing, gulping sobs - I cried in my sleep. Ever have those dreams where you want to wake yourself up by screaming? I tried last night but never succeeded. I mourned like a loved one had died. There is an idea of America constructed in my head, built by my associations with the land, the people, the cities. It died last night. A new America was born last night. An imperial America, a theocratic America, an America built by fear and loathing. This great nation that can destroy anyone cowers from shadows. It fears the gay man who will destroy its families. It fears the slut teen who will kill her unborn child. It fears the brown man who will detonate a bomb in the mall. It fears the secular intellectual who will corrupt the youth." (Sepoy)

"(the) apathetic american population (inlcuding democrats) will all get over this, and everything will go back to business as usual, as long as i can have my starbucks in the morning and lunch at the drive thru at Mcdonalds in my SUV (hummer) and bomb a couple of countries when i feel snippish. ah, the american dream." (my sister)

"Sorry to have to put it this way, but WHAT ARE PEOPLE THINKING?!" (from abroad)

"I am slowly realizing that my country has gone to the religious right - the same phenomenon that masks political agendas and drives hatred all over the world and ultimately justifies systematic killings of civilians in the Middle East... Our president, who believes the laws of the US are derived from Gd, has clearly stated that he acts in order to fulfill Gd's will - not the will of the people of California, or New York, or DC, or anywhere else that sits as a terrorist target, not the poor people without health care, not the paraplegics who could benefit from stem cell research, not my neighbors who are gay, not Muslim-Americans, not school children in poor neighborhoods, not the people who want peace, not people who call for universal human rights" (a friend)

"Next semester's classes at the law school will now be: the history of civil liberties, the history of labor law (as both of these cease to exist), how to get canadian citizenship, jd's working at starbucks, how to speak canadian, election intimidation and the art of dis-enfranchisement, deportation as a vacation from life." (people trying to make me laugh at school)

"What gets me isn't that Bush won the election. It really isn't. It's the strong margin of victory. It's the fact that Republicans increased their House majority 2 seats. That Daschle was ejected. That the very blatantly racist Tom Coburn won in Oklahoma. That Gov. Knowles lost to someone appointed by her Dad in Alaska. That the most extreme wing of the Republican Party led it to a 55 seat majority" (Faraz)

"Ralph Nader- is now the equivalent of a swear word. If you are mad, just say it: RALPH NADER!" (sad friends as we watched the poll results come in)

"It was my pleasure." (a 70 year old black woman, in response to our congratulations, after she waited more than 7 hours to vote)

"Take time to feel the desolation and disappointment. But I remain confident that time is not on the side of the kind of values and politics that President Bush represents. It took conservatives two decades to build up the institutional muscle they have today. Though I was always nervous about the result, I thought we could win this election. But it was always naive to believe that that sort of institutional heft could be put together in 24 or 36 months" (Marshall)

"People now will not tolerate the United States behaving like the British and the French conquering countries and creating new colonies. The people of the Third World did not fight for independence for 200 years against the British and the French and the Dutch and the Belgians and every other little European country that thought it had the military and economic power to push brown and black and yellow people around because they had something that they wanted. Well, that period of history is past! The Vietnamese should have taught everybody this. You do not go and take over somebody else’s country."
"There are two ways for George Bush and Washington to learn this lesson. One will be a slaughter in Iraq and then decades of violence, where there will be people who will step off the sidewalk when they see an American, because they are so afraid. Or Americans will realize this is not the world that they want. It is a choice between wars of conquest, wars of colonization, things of the past, or the future based on a common, shared respect for everyone."
Can it really be that Americans have decided that this is the world they want?" (Podur quoting zia mian)

"I almost feel that smart people should go on strike for four years just in a kind of "Atlas Shrugged" way, except with the opposite politics. If you are a thinking person it's becoming impossible to go along with this program. And if he wins it's not even left vs. right, or red vs. blue anymore. It's thinking vs. not thinking, and the thinking people should go on strike." (Prof John-Paul Spiro)

"It's just a matter of time people. I truly believe that. We'll take our country back. Because this is the important stuff. We have all been brought together by this experience, and we WILL NOT forget again. They are counting on us forgetting, going back to sleep, resume complacency, nibble the grass like good little sheep. Ha. We are like insurgents ourselves: the more you beat us down the stronger we will get. Do the kids say "booyah" anymore?" (SCB)

"But we (meaning intelligent, fair-minded, civilized, mostly good-looking liberals) got f*ed by a bunch of Bible-thumping, gun-toting, gay-hating rednecks. And not just in the presidential election, but in a majority of elections. There are two Americas that are fundamentally opposed to each other. This is at the same time infuriating and terrifying. - So...I'm moving out of the country. Three questions: who's coming with me, where are we going, and what are we going to wear?" (Mulgrew)

"I think I will give everyone I know a lot of duct tape to try to hold their skulls together so when Bush talks their brains don't shoot out of the back of their heads." (Internebbish)

Please someone pass me the duct-tape.