I very rarely comment on politics, preferring rather to blather on about my personal and social life. Being on the sensitive side, I can’t lie and shrug off the current goings on in our country. I listen to an incredible amount of NPR…I listen to it during my thirty minute commute into the city, on the way out of the city, while I’m cooking dinner, etc. I listen to it so often that I hear repeats of the news at four and then again at six–usually nothing has changed. I listen to the radio with such fervor that nothing is ‘news’ to me…if Josh tells me something cutting edge I’ll usually shrug and say I learned it several hours ago when it was breaking news.

I try to be good and shut the radio off when I feel myself zoning out; bored with the financial news or the graphic coverage of the war, I’ll click it off and drive or cook in silence. I can’t handle repeated retellings of carnage and suicide bombers. I’ve been known to start crying during the segment on War Letters or the touching journalistic pieces profiling fallen soldiers and the families they left behind.
But the fact that our country is under the thumb of a crazy idiot, a president whose voice is so painful to my ears that I impulsively snap the radio on and off during his address to the nation–I can’t listen to him straight through. “LIES!” I holler at the radio when Bush stated, “We are winning.” I can’t even express how utterly offended I was when he referred to the nightmare in Iraq as WINNING, as if there was a shred of accuracy or reality to that statement. It’s like the whole situation is an unhappy rain cloud on my relatively normal life.

While watching my new favorite series on the Discovery Channel, Discovery Atlas, I was enraptured by the intense imagery of different countries. When covering Australia the narrator states, “This country is at peace with all countries.” And suddenly, I was sad and I said aloud, “I wish we were at peace with all countries.” It’s as if the war is so common and so normal that I forget that at one point in my life we didn’t have this shameful bit hanging over our country.
During the last few weeks I’ve felt a smidgen of hope. As I ingested my daily dose of NPR I began to absorb the impending doom of the Republican party. I felt a morbid sense of cheeriness when another Republican sex scandel makes the news. I quietly imagined what my conservative in-laws are thinking, knowing the Missouri has been taken over by a Democrat. I clinked imaginery champaign at Rumsfeld’s resignation (it’s about time…I heard he had hoped to step down on a positive note…when it never came he settled for today, a day of transition and change).

I remember the first time Josh said to me, several years ago, “Hey, did you hear Bush wants to go after Iraq?” The second he said this to me, I felt a full body chill, this horrible sense of doom. I couldn’t even speak I was so shocked…finally I said, “I think that’s a horrible idea.” There wasn’t an instant that I ever, ever, thought that going to war with Iraq was a sane idea. From the moment the UN started looking for WMD’s to the casual, “well, guess we have to take em’ by force” nature of the military, I’ve always thought the whole concept was audacious. The fact that the rest of country has slowly started to come around in a collective, “Hey, this is messed up,” is really wonderful news.