It's strange to think that exactly a week ago there still was time, that we all stood at a crossroads, that things could have turned out differently. But they didn't -- and millions of hopeful Kerry supporters felt the weight of the next four years fall on their shoulders.
After staying up all Tuesday night (subsisting on cloves and Red Bull) I finally went to class Wednesday teary-eyed, wearing sweatpants and a United Nations T-shirt. I haven't felt so crappy since Jake Gyllenhaal got back with that strumpet Kirsten Dunst.
At home, the dark clouds hung above the dinner table and only my dad (who reads three newspapers a day) broke the silence, announcing he was giving up all news media. Kerry supporters from all over the country were describing their disposition as angry, depressed, frightened and deeply disappointed.
Though it may be hard to convince your HMO of it, we were all suffering from post-election depression.
Experts from all around the country agree that such a condition exists. On National Public Radio last week, Emmanuel Maidenberg, a clinical psychologist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatry Institute and Hospital noted: "Marked by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, losing the election challenges the validity of people's value systems, which is psychologically hard to take."
The good news is that this condition persists for a relatively short period of time: from one to three weeks. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist who has studied voters' reactions to elections, has a positive outlook. "They don't think they'll be over it in a month, but they will be," he said in an interview for MSNBC.com.
Though I certainly don't wish illness on anyone, I wonder whether this "return" to our previous state is necessarily a good thing. Though our lives may not seem to change drastically day to day, the very reason we were so depressed about the election in the first place will persist.
Bush's environmental policies are going to destroy more land, court appointments more civil rights, education programs more potential and foreign policy more hard won alliances. With a Republican House, senate and president, the spending (of money which we don't have, by the way) is going to increase, and now the president believes he has the mandate of the American people to do it.
The 48 percent of voters who disagree shouldn't shrug their shoulders and say to themselves, "Oh well, we did our best. I guess it was not meant to be," and move on. If there ever was a time to be emotionally distraught, it's now.
But instead of making our disappointment dissipate into apathy, we should begin healing both our psyches and our country by externalizing our emotions and re-investing them into political activism.
Presidential elections are over; the fight for women's equality in the workplace, seniors' right to affordable and accessible health care and everyone's right to breathe clean air is not.
I hope as you scrape the bumper stickers off of your cars and throw away your Kerry buttons, you retain the strong convictions that brought you to support him.
I started wearing regular clothes again, and on Friday I saw my dad reading Time. Slowly but surely, we are coming out of our postelection blues and realizing we lost a battle, not the war.
And that once again we stand at a crossroads, only this time the opponent is us: Let's let the Bush camp know we love this country too much to abandon our causes, and let's keep up our commitment to politics.
Lucia Bill is a journalism and political science sophomore. Reach her at lucia.bill@asu.edu.
