The End of an Error

I voted yesterday by absentee ballot. This is the first presidential election that I've been eligible to vote in. I think this means that I am officially a participant in democratic process? Total sense of accomplishment.

We've almost come to the end of the last eight years of backwards governing, of war and tears. There is a sense of joy at the end, a sense of relief. We as a nation and as a world have definitely earned the opportunity to celebrate the end of an error. No matter how the election ends, I personally feel that nothing (including the election of John McCain, possibly excluding the election of VP Sarah Palin the complete and total nut-job) can come close to the tragedy that was the last eight years.


To have come through it: to have joyfully
survived even the happiness - quietly, completely.
First the testings were mute, then verbal.
Who could look back unamazed?

No one has been able, since life lasts
because no one could. - But the infiniteness
of the attemps! The new greenness of birch trees
is not so new as that which behalls us.

A wood dove coos. And again what you suffered
seems, ah, as if yet unlived-through.
The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle
of the call. Awake and weakened
- Rilke 1921