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2004-11-03 - 8:42 p.m.

A FORMAL APOLOGY

Dear Friends - I'm sorry I just have to vent.

For the last four years, I and my friends have been informing non-Americans that the Bush administration was a fraud, a big mistake, a political coup. We didn't VOTE for them.

Well, today my country has proven us wrong and I feel stunned, enraged, and impotent. Today we have voted in the most overwhelmingly neoconservative government I've ever known as a US citizen, and they now control every branch of it. Today the US majority has told the world that we feel that pre-emptive strikes are acceptable, and that lying to the global stage to justify them is no problem. We feel it's okay to torture and sexually humiliate prisoners. It's also just fine if our friends' corporations benefit from contracts to feed a war that kills over 1000 of our own countrymen, and more than 100,000 of those human beings we now claim we wanted to "free." And it is okay to cut the benefits and pensions of those soldiers we've sent to face this war. We feel just fine with destroying the old growth forests, we feel fine with repealing every piece of legislation that ever deemed to protect our skies, waters, climate and land. We wholly accept that the economic divide in our country has approached that of a Charles Dickens novel, because our education system is so poor that most of us have probably never READ one. And we will lie to you about these things with smiles on our faces, by snowballing every vestige of American journalism with Orwellian titles like "operation freedom" "no child left behind" and "clear skies."

Today I am saddened and embarrassed to be an American.

The voters, when polled, claimed that their most important issues were 1) the war on terror, and 2) moral values. The irony is so thick, it is astounding. New York City, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania, all states struck hardest by hateful terrorist acts in 2001, ALL VOTED overwhelmingly AGAINST Bush. As a citizen of New York City who feels more unsafe than ever because of this "war president," I would like to ask the entire population of the middle states: Just exactly what terrorist act do you fear is going to hit Montana, Kansas, or Wyoming? an invasion from CANADA?

I have sat here wondering what can I possibly do in the wake of such a political outcome, in New York City where student friends of mine are poor enough that they dig their food out of dumpsters, and others choose between paying rent or having health care. I do not know how to mend the divisivenes that this administration has brought upon the USA and the world. But I now feel more determined than ever to protect myself, my immigrant friends, my foreign neighbors, my health care, and my world environment. This has made me more determined than ever to preserve MY moral values and MY safety, be it from terrorist actions, or from diseases that I cannot afford on my health care plan.

I have only small ideas, but I must do something. And the first is to say that I apologize for the ass who sits in the oval office, and for my simpleminded countrymen who want to believe that he is the answer instead of the problem.

Soon you will hear from me again, as my mind churns further.

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