From the brink of tasting victory to the abyss of defeat …
Shellshocked. The only word to describe the feeling this morning, not only in my own head, but it feels like everywhere I look. ASquared is not a particularly happy village this morning. The skies are overcast and the chill of oncoming winter is in the air. The conversation on the bus was bitterness about Kerry conceding too soon and ignoring the provisional ballots in neighboring Ohio (though frankly the likelihood of those ballots making a statistical difference was nil or close to it). The campus was practically deserted and people on cell phones were expressing incredulity about the closeness of the results. The GovDocs room was a graveyard, except for one lone student who bent ober his laptop in sleep-deprived despair and mumbled about his feelings of misery to a friend who walked by (the friend was ebullient, so he probably voted for Bush). A worker in the pharmacy at Village Apothecary joked that he should have driven to Ohio to cast his ballot there so he could have affected the total.
Then there’s Proposal 2, which I don’t even want to talk about. How can people be so cruel?