On election night, 2004, I wrote the following email to my friends and family:
My fellow Americans,
We have doomed a great nation to its demise.
Bush's second term will be calamitous.
The treasury will be raided by the influential rich.
A towering national debt will be left to our progeny to fund corporate and defense build-up.
Corporate power will grow unchecked around the world.
Protections for our natural wildernesses will be abolished.
Our personal rights will be weakened.
Our privacy will be increasingly violated.
The invocation of gods against gods will cause devastating worldwide conflict.
Environmental regulation will be pushed-back, opening the landscape to be stripped of its resources for profit.
Social Security will be decimated under the dishonest guise of privatization.
Over-heated patriotic bravado will lead to more bloodshed.
Misunderstanding of the rest of the world will lead to continued hatred of the U.S.
American workers will increasingly lose whatever benefits they have left.
The right to dissent will be ridiculed and attacked.
The nation will become more bitterly divided.
Verbal bullies will dominate public discourse.
Critical questioning by the media, already mistrusted, will be stifled.
Opposition positions will be countered and quelled by personal attacks.
A Republican-controlled legislature will ram-rod its agenda into law.
The culture wars will poison civil, intelligent, political conversation.
The ability to see and understand nuance will be falsely mocked as vacillation.
Lies will be told boldly, loudly and repeatedly until they are wrongly accepted as truth.
Policy makers, who have little knowledge or regard for other cultures, will make blunderous decisions.
Undeterred terrorism will be bred around the globe.
Issues will be framed simplistically in black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.
More of our children will die for the wrong reasons.
We will all rue the day a jingoistic electorate gave carte blanche to the puppet masters Rove, Hughes, Cheney, Wolfkowitz, Rumsfeld, Frist and their corporate cronies.
I wish you and yours all the best.
David.
I despair for us all.
And, so, most came to pass. Please, please do NOT elect John McCain for four more years of the same.
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