The difficulty in following your counsel here lies squarely in the paragraph preceding it.
I've been pondering my ambivalence, rummaging among the rooms of my stupid little life, to steal a phrase. Personal reflections may be a weak brew to ferment into social change. My Democratic leanings around election time have rarely been on the same track as my political beliefs. Yes, there's been lots of lessers, lots of tactical blocks of conservative offensives, lots of pursuing practical change, lots of just protecting the good that's been accomplished. But there's always steady-state dissonance that I, like I suspect many others, feel and not just the morning after. And we sustain it for various reasons.
Since the bulk of my work is teaching sociology, the usual liturgy common to LBO, I should know better. But I don't vote my what I know or what I believe. And it sounds far more bizarre than the way it's lived. Protected by relative privilege and comfort, buffered by the abstract and distant versus experiential and immediate, navigating reference groups and social worlds, consumed by everday routines and responsibilities - all these combine with the more intellectual fare of cynicism, fatalism, irony, hopes and dreams, countervailing theories to militate forcefully against giving up what you characterize as childish things.
While Yoshie may long for the passing of Tuesday here, the steady drumbeat here on LBO has been educational, to say the least.
The strangest thing has happened this election. After all those years complaining about one's vote not mattering, some of us are faced with that reality that our individual vote may matter in some significant way. Talk about shitting or getting off the pot...
Dennis Breslin