civic duties of the befuddled

I stirred from a couple-hours sleep at shift change this morning. My breath was killing me from behind pursed lips. One of those nights... My second lucid thought--after, oh yes, I am at work--was that I expected to see a co-worker come dancing in, giddy with the expected landslide smack-down refutation of Hope/Change. My waking mind put forth the question, rhetorically, to my not-yet-present co-worker: Isn't it a bit counter-productive to be thrilled to vote for a party whose first order of business, most likely, (upon taking senate/house, governor's office, white house) will be to overturn your right to marry and to serve in military, and to have basic benefits for you & your long-term partner?' To which, she imaginarily responded (as she has in the past) that she was a fiscal republican. Supporting the party who rocks out for the super-rich is a bit like the fire department deciding to vote to give Rocco Forte and his regulatory services empire a raise, taking from our own pockets money to pad his retirement nest.

And then my day began.
I keep having visions of horrified and repulsed Europeans, Africans, Slaviks, etc, as if they were watching average americans roam the parking lots and discount shopping malls in their ridiculous big cars, buying ridiculous oversized shit, and complaining about the threats to their way of life while ensconced in their big, dumb american houses. Ask most of them to identify some solid, actual threat from Obama (NO, he isn't and hasn't rounded up your guns and ammo, but that canard keeps the NRA homefires of cash flow burning bright) or some actual, plausible solution your tea partying friends will actual do... and there will be awkward silence or incoherent half-garbled non-truths from cable news crawl. And those folks in places where the stakes are real and are high will look at us, not with envy, but with horror, fear, disdain, perhaps even pity.

What the fuck.