Tuesday was already shitty and rainy, and I felt sick for half the day, and then the election results were horrible that night. I swear, it's like the 2010 midterms all over again. But it was the same across the country, so even the blue-state liberals who are always so smug about how Texas should secede, should realize that they have right-wing crazies who win in their states too.
The only bright spots locally are that I still have my Democratic congressman and the Democratic candidate that I wanted for my State Board of Education district won. Clay Jenkins also won for Dallas County Judge. Oh, and Denton passed a fracking ban, but no doubt the natural gas industry is going to try to sue to get it struck down.
It's hard to live with this defeat so often. Lately I've been watching the Ken Burns special on the Roosevelts, and I see how bitter the politics were back then too. How people called FDR a tyrant and a traitor to his class. How they threatened to impeach him, and how he threatened to pack the Supreme Court because they kept striking down his New Deal laws. How Eleanor tried to work for reform and social progress, only to be criticized and for Franklin to resist because he had to appease conservatives and win re-election. I haven't seen two episodes yet, but it's disheartening to see how politics have been fucked up for a long time.
I was very upset when I heard that Jon Stewart said he didn't vote, which made many people blast him as a hypocrite. Eventually he issued an apology and said he was just joking, but I'm still sore at him for what he said about the Texas governor's race the other day. Sure, he turned out to be right, but it contributes to the defeatist attitude that we can never turn Texas blue. People thinking that midterms don't matter, and that their vote won't change anything, is how we get low voter-turnout. People fought for this right to vote; no one should blow it off like it means nothing. I'm glad that even Sleepy Hollow this year made a point of Abbie pointing this out to Ichabod when she voted.
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