wow

I don't remember ever seeing a campaign picture that made me cry before. Even with the ways I disagree with Obama, and the times he pissed me off during the primaries, it is really sinking now, in the homestretch, how monumental the impact he has on people really is. I'm hopeful. That's a new feeling politically, one that has been buried behind a wall of horror and anger for eight years. I never thought I'd see the day when we have troops on the ground in the US training with police to quell "civil unrest". It never occurred to me that we'd lose habeas corpus. I couldn't have been the only one who shivered when rather than calling our nation the Republic it became the Homeland. All of the rhetoric, all of the hatred, all of the slow, creeping loss of our identity as a democracy - in fact, the creeping loss of our democracy - maybe, just maybe we have a chance to slow it down enough to think about it.

Maybe. Maybe for a little while, my certainty that we are in the early stages of a civil war can fade to the back burner. I'm scared to hope. The last eight years have really opened my eyes to how deeply hatred runs in this country, how provincial and xenophobic we still are.

This wasn't meant to be a political post, but that picture...full-on blubbing. Every time.