Nifty word, isn't it? It's British slang for
"knocked into the street with astonishment" or something equivalent to that. It perfectly expressed how my family and I feel since Tuesday night: like we've been sucker-punched.
The last time we suffered a national tragedy of these proportions was, naturally, eleven days into the month of September, three years ago. My parents responded, I guess, rather predictably, by turning very nasty with each other, and with me; sadly, I responded in kind.
Osama would've been proud of how we behaved; employing emotional firebombs against our own flesh and blood, guilting people into doing things against their best judgment simply to please others,
screaming, yelling, storming off, yanking down tiny U.S. flags simply to feebly protest the lemming-like hatred pouring out of this nation's people, all of this in the wake of a mass murder inflicted upon innocents by those who have
no innocence.
In short: we were our own worst enemies.
It's happened again. My folks and I are hardly speaking to one another, except through emails. We voted for Kerry; I blogged incessantly; we urged friend and stranger alike not to return the supremely incompetent George W. Bush to the White House. Fifty-one percent of our eligible voters did so anyhow. And now, we're eating ourselves raw again, because we have no recourse. Just like the Democratic Party in general, I suspect, although I've seen no conclusive evidence to support this yet.
How did this happen again???? What did we fail to learn from all of this??? And what do we do now????
My father, who was never an enthusiastic voter under the best of circumstances, is now saying he threw his vote away, for the second time in four years, on a man who didn't want to win. Hogwash; Kerry conceded because he recognized the futility of battling a 3.5-million vote edge held by Bush (tinfoil-hat wearers, start your conspiracy theories). I pointed out to him how foolish, and how futile, this type of thinking is, and how it plays precisely into Karl Rove's hands. Dad says, so be it, but no more votes from him are going to Democratic candidates for high offices. He actually sent a reply to one of those political mass e-mail letters from Howard Dean, challenging the good doctor's assertion (a quite proper one, I think) that this fight was never just about November 2, it only began there. Dad claimed he told Dr. Dean, on the contrary, it ended with the election of George W. Bush by millions of idiots who apparently don't mind---who may even prefer---being out of work, forced to shop only at Wal-Mart superstores (a major Bush/Cheney financial friend, naturally), to go without health insurance, to send their sons to Iraq to die for Halliburton's bottom line, etc.
I am blue in the face---pardon the pun---trying to console my folks, who are both veterans of humiliating election results in the Sixties through the Twenty-first Century. My sister lives in one of the battleground states; I admit, I was less than comforted by her day-after "cheer up" message. I told her so; she told me she didn't want to continue to communicate with me in any way, because she wanted to be "only positive" from now on---an ostrich-like position to take, I think, but one from which I can't budge her, especially since she won't read my emails.
I feel queasy. I feel absolutely ill. I am left trying not to succumb, when I go to visit my folks, to my father's pessimism ("Most people will make the wrong decision every single time, no matter how much information you give them first to steer them right" is typical of his cornucopia of love for mankind), even as I have to reject my mother's blind good cheer; she shares my sister's Pollyanna-ish dewy faith in a better world than only they can live in. As for my baby brother, a first-time voter at university, I haven't heard him say yet that he won't bother to ever do so again, but I know that's coming.
But enough about me. How're YOU doing?