And one more thing, from a post by Leila, whose entire archives deserve to be read:
I think I need to clarify what I meant when I said I hoped we wouldn’t be sore losers. I did not mean that we should give up activism, our beliefs, or our place in society. I did mean that conspiracy theories like “the machines were programmed in favor of Bush” were ways of missing the point. Here’s what a friend said recently that I agree with: “We have to face the hard fact that 51% of us have actually asked for whatever happens next; that this was a fair fight and we now have a legitimate president.”
This is what I’m talking about. That we, as democrats, have been unable to make connections with enough citizens of our country to have the vote go in our favor. That we haven’t, as another friend mentioned so eloquently, been able to provide alternatives to the various fears that drove this last election the way it went. That in spite of the fact that so many of the world’s educational institutions and think tanks tend toward the left, we haven’t harnessed that power and energy to solve this problem (or at the very least to market our values better). This is a wake up call.
Canada is not the solution. Whining about machines is not the solution. Being smarter and more strategic is the solution.
Keep that activist spirit alive, kids.