I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

I duly wore my pantsuit on Tuesday, and I voted around 7:30am CST, before work. #pantsuitnation

At lunchtime I said to Etrace, "I think there needs to be heavy drinking tonight." "By you?!" he said. "Are you really that concerned about the outcome?" "Hell yes I am concerned," I said. But nailbiting notwithstanding, deep down I never really doubted that Hillary would get the landslide she deserved.

Well, it turns out we all got a surprise. :-/

Between dinner (Taco Tuesday!) and baby bedtime, I didn't really see any election results in progress until about 10pm Central. By which time the map had tipped heavily Trump. And then I would have liked to start drinking heavily, but I also felt too nauseated to start. I got into bed and sat with my iPad obsessively refreshing Facebook until well after midnight.

Maybe it will come around overnight, I thought. They're still tallying.

But no. Wednesday morning I woke up to our national nightmare. I felt numb. I actually cried on my drive to work.

If I haven't said it here before, my mom (who lives in northern CA) has been a big Trump supporter, and in fact so rabidly anti-Clinton in her Facebook comments and reposts that I've begun to wonder of late if she's actually coming a bit unhinged. We have basically agreed not to speak of the election.

Her younger sister though (who seems to show some distaste for Trump, but has been rabidly anti-Obama, so it's all of a piece) commented on Wednesday "I survived 8 years of Obama, you'll survive 4 years of Trump." I wanted to say "Yes, but FYI, not everyone will." But I didn't know how to get into it without spiraling off into futility.

I have many, many thoughts, but a week later here's what seems to have shaken out:

(1) No one actually knows what Trump himself is going to do while in office. He's talked big, but that was on the campaign trail. We all know the guy's full of nothing but hot air, and changes his stance to whatever his audience wants to hear. In a way, that's almost comforting.
(2) However, the people he's surrounding himself with (you know, to DO HIS ACTUAL WORK while in office)... scare the everloving shit out of me. Starting with Mike Pence, who is if possible the one person I would less like to see in the presidency than Trump.
(3) The "anti-PC" climate that says "This is Trump's America now, so we can be as hateful as we've always secretly wanted"... ditto.

I would add corroborating links to the above, but it's too depressing. :-/

So, what to do? For starters, I will keep supporting my top causes: reproductive rights (Planned Parenthood of course, Medical Students for Choice, and the Center for Reproductive Rights) and civil liberties (the ACLU). (Amazon shoppers, remember that if you shop via smile.amazon.com you can designate a charity to receive a percentage of your sales. I chose Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.)

Beyond that: Be strong. Support education and social programs closer to home. Show compassion. Stand up for truth and justice (and, not for nothing, the real American Way).

Posted publicly because I think this is important (comments are enabled on this entry, for now, though I reserve the right to turn them off if any ensuing discussion grows uncivil):

My friendspage has been buzzing all week with reactions to last Sunday's act of anti-choice terrorism, the brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, KS.

( Links from today that I found particularly meaningful )

That last article links, among other resources, to Medical Students for Choice, an organization dedicated to "Creating Tomorrow's Abortion Providers and Pro-Choice Physicians. [...] Medical Students for Choice® stands up in the face of violent opposition, working to destigmatize abortion provision among medical students and residents, and to persuade medical schools and residency programs to include abortion as a part of the reproductive health services curriculum."

I clicked through immediately and made a donation. I am a longtime Planned Parenthood member and onetime clinic defender... but beyond that, I often think that if I had it to do over again, I would seriously consider medical school SPECIFICALLY in order to become a provider of women's reproductive health services. I'm glad to know there are concrete ways of supporting others to carry out that mission in my stead.

Shabbat shalom, y'all. I'm headed out of here shortly.

Yeah, I voted this morning, OK? Took just under an hour. But I have a better story to tell.

Yesterday afternoon, when I checked my cellphone around 5:30pm, it showed three missed calls from my dad over several hours, without leaving any messages. (tapuz: "Crap! Is he okay?" Me: "Well, that was my first thought...!") So I called him back.

Why was he trying to reach me?

He had recently finished reading Obama's book (The Audacity of Hope), and the thing that was still weighing on his mind was, what is Obama's stance on Israel? "I can't seem to find a clear answer," he said. "So I called to find out from you what the conventional wisdom is."

I told him that the reason he can't find a clear answer is that there isn't one -- that it's a rather murky question, with editorial arguments coming down on both sides! That the "conventional" conventional wisdom seems to be "Obama is a threat to Israel," and that some otherwise-Democratically-aligned people are sticking with McCain purely on the good-for-the-Jews angle. But that I have also heard impassioned arguments as to why Obama is actually pro-Israel, and that most of the [liberal, Jewish] people I know, myself included, are not letting the possible controversy diminish their support for him.

And we proceeded to have a 25-minute conversation wherein he laid out his grave and heartfelt concerns about the current election and the outgoing ("I've voted Republican since I was 18, but...!") administration.

I was just so impressed. I'm still marveling at it.

Also, I emailed him the following links afterwards:

http://www.jewsobamaisrael.com/ (this is someone I know from my synagogue, and she gives a bunch more links on the topic)

From YNetNews: Obama better for Israel; Israel needs active US peace-making involvement, not empty expressions of solidarity

From the New York Sun: "Mr. Obama's commitment to Israel, as he has articulated it so far in his campaign, is quite moving..."

From Haaretz: Obama supports Israel. Period.

Conversely: from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news source with a known conservative political slant: Arab-American Activist Says Obama Hiding Anti-Israel Stance

... I've been kind of in the camp of "ready for all this narishkeit to be over" for some time now. But I'll duly be showing up at gedalia's at some point later tonight, after I get some work done at home, hopefully to see history being made.

ETA: Or, on second thought, maybe I won't, as I suddenly seem to be feeling rather more crappy and running a low-grade (99.5F) fever. :-P I've had this cold/cough for nearly 2 weeks; it ought to have run its course by now, surely? ... But at least we made it to Ben & Jerry's for our free cones before I started feeling it.

Bunch o' links from my friend Ben in Oklahoma: E-voting fraud rampant in states without paper trails. (Duh! Yes, I know, but here:)

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/2004votefraud.html
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1699421,00.asp
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65535,00.html?tw=wn_story_mailer

Kerry let us all down with his poor excuse for a campaign, and now he's letting us all down by passively stepping back when he should be fighting this into the ground. How can he? How?

Morning:

Shul annual meeting where I stepped down as vice-president (but was incepted as head of the newly-official 20s&30s *Committee*, which hitherto has operated as sort of a black box to the rest of the shul community. Hopefully this bodes well).

Afternoon:

Made buttons for besamim and one for tapuz.

Watched The Lion in Winter (the 1968 Hepburn/O'Toole version, not the forthcoming Close/Stewart version, though I am eager to see that one). There was a lot about it that failed to thrill me, actually. I look forward to drawing more out of it. :-)

Finally went to the grocery store. And cooked a pot of rice. And did dishes. No laundry though (mentally begging off until tonight, due to rain).

Evening:

Four hours of Menschen rehearsal for our concerts this weekend! (Sneak preview: Our "shtick" [comedy] portion of this performance is a running skit entitled "Frum Eye for the Goy Trayf Guy"... Really, y'all should come see us. ;-)

An hour-plus at the zogathons' for Mr. Zog's birthday/dissertation defense/head-shaving party. Was so happy to see them for the first time in literally months. Brought them buttons too. Re-met some very cool people. Was reminded as soon as I got there about the equal marriage festival about to take place just three blocks from my own house. How could I not go?

Got to Cambridge City Hall a few moments after midnight. It was amazing. "This restores my faith in humanity." There were surprisingly few protesters who bothered to show up. And as soon as I got there I found a whole crowd of people I knew who were there as supporters... up to and including my best beloved. We hugged and cried (well, I did, at least, if not for all the same reasons) and laughed and cheered like mad and blew bubbles and took pictures. I stayed until nearly 3:00 a.m., by which time the crowd had thinned out considerably to just a couple hundred (!), but I wanted to see mattlistener and mud_puppy emerge with their license, which they finally did, in matching rainbow-striped solidarity vests. Adorable and very touching.

Tired today. But glad I can say I was there.