Day One

We always knew that, no matter who won, today would be Day One.  It was always true that we would still have a lot of work ahead of us once the election was over; if a Bush win is validated, it's just more work than we were hoping for.

The only thing that's over is the election, there's still a lot of democracy ahead of us that needs sorting out.  Even though votes are still being disputed, we need to focus now on the work that we always knew was waiting for us after the election was over.

We need to focus on election reform.  If you have thousands of lawyers out on the ground in anticipation of finding something worth disputing, then something's wrong.  If you have electronic voting machines that don't leave a paper trail that can be verified later, then something's wrong.  If you have thousands or millions of people who are illegally disenfranchised of their right to vote, then something's wrong.

We have to fight for transparency in government.  This administration is and will continue to be the most secretive in our nation's history, which is against the public interest.  Get involved with your senators, get involved with your representatives, educate yourselves on the issues and have conversations with your friends and colleagues.  Use tools like the Freedom of Information Act, and support groups like the ACLU, to prevent any administration acting like this one has and will continue to do.

We have a better command of the tools offered by the internet than we ever have before.  We need to hit the ground running and start right now working on achieving our goals of restoring true democracy to the country.  This is going to be harder now than we thought, but it was going to be hard anyway; this isn't news.  

I really have a hard time believing the amount of finger-pointing and second-guessing and yelling at each other that I'm seeing here.  Isn't this the same thing people were making fun of the freepers for doing when we thought we had this thing in the bag?  The real problem here is that the reality didn't live up to our expectations, but you know what?  That's life.

Not that the recounting and verifying are worthless, but we can't afford to wait around for that to be decided before figuring out what we want to do from here on out.  Let's keep an eye on the recount stuff, but today is the first day of a new election cycle, and let's not forget that.  Start working now to figure out why things didn't work the way we thought they would, and what to do about it for the next time we have to go through this.

Today is Day One.  Let's get started.