It was around last February as the Democratic Primaries were heating up that for the first time I decided I was going to vote for a Democrat.
We were a house divided, I had chosen to support Barack and my Girlfriend has been a longtime Clinton supporter, I can tell you that there were many very tense times for 4 or 5 months in my house.
I had been at times in my life pretty passive about politics. I would vote based on what I thought to be true, I voted pro-life once or twice even(I have since outgrown that).
As the intensity of the primaries grew, I became more and more active in my support. At times I'm sure I was borish.
When Senator Clinton's run was closing down my girlfriend toed the line and became an adamant supporter of Barack's too. She had always been a democrat.
We're in Texas and we are outnumbered. We decided that we needed to send donations to Barack to help him in other states because lets face it, Texas was a redstate and we had to help. So we did, we sent some donations. We got some buttons, we spread em around.
As our activisim blossomed we sought more and more information.
We found out that MSNBC was awesome, Fox sucked, CNN was hot and cold.
We liked Keith. Bill Maher became hilarious. John Stewart rocked.
It was in the beginning of August that I stumbled upon DKos. I had no idea that there were forums such as that, wow. You can go to this site and get all sorts of information, joke, get in arguements, reflect on what the days events were.
I found it to be very captivating, I learned so much about subjects that I never really thought too much about. Prop 8? Why would I care? Well it turns out it did matter to me. I became much more contemplative about the positions I would take on issues. I got to admire so many of the people here, their wonderfull conviction, passion, knowledge, and god dang could some of them write so well.
I saw some famous people drop by, Keith, J Kerry, M Moore, a few others. Rachel launched her show-that was a big day.
Just about every day I would stop in make some comments, read some diaries and learn the drama of the day. I was hooked.
I went to vote last week, I early voted for the 1st time ever, I almost voted a straight democratic ticket (almost), we donated to Barack, to the DNC to Hillary (to help her debt), we emailed friends, we tried to help others vote, we went to the polling places to see if we could help anyone in line (it turned out our lines were not so bad, TX pfft).
Our county (Bexar- San Antonio)was won by Barack by about 5% (30k votes or so).
We felt that we had helped accomplish something great, even if it were just in some small way. It felt good last night to get to bed early knowing our guy had won.
It hit me when I came here today to see the drama of the day, I had gone from orange to blue.
I'm sure i'll be a fixture, it feels good and im so happy to have found you all. I got TU Status a week or so ago. I looked it up this evening, I had made 2811 comments since August.
Thanks Kos and everyone else.