25 Days Later ...

... well, first of all, I have to admit I didn't expect to stay silent for this long.

Frankly, even though I thought I was braced for this year's election results, the reality of it hit me a lot harder than I thought.  It's not me, the Democrats (and certainly not the ones in Congress), or progressives in general for whom I'm depressed.

It's this country.  And its seeming inability to to think, and to treat voting as something worth thinking about.

Why else would you vote back into power (or, more precisely, one-third of power) the same gang of lying thieves who trashed this country in the first place?

In fairness, the voters in this election were enabled by three factors:

1.  The Supreme Court, which decided that corporations are people with unlimited rights to buy elections;

2.  Wall Street, which thanked the Democrats for saving capitalism by investing their record profits into buying said elections, instead of creating jobs for voters (except for Tea Party organizers and promoters); and

3.  Last, and certainly not the least, President Obama, who in hindsight has largely conducted an in-box presidency, allowing everyone but him to define the debate--its substance, its terms and, sadly, its conclusion.  Unwilling to see, until too late, that Republicans in Congress had no sense of national self-interest, he allowed Congress to do all of the heavy lifting, with the result that both he and Democrats in Congress paid a steep and perhaps tragic price.

As I've said previously, there's no reason to give up.  The nature of our political system, at its best and at at its worst, allows both sides to win their share of battles.  But this is ultimately a war of ideas, even if it is often fueled by raw and ugly emotions, and our side has the ideas that work.

But we're not going to get there from here to there without changes.  And the biggest change of all has to come from us.

We can't count on elected officials to do it all.  If history teaches us anything, it's that we've never been able to.  Real change in this country has always flowed up from the streets.  Only then does change trickle down from Pennsylvania Avenue.

And we might as well take a page out of the other's sides book.  They never sleep.  They never go away.  And they certainly don't wait a generation or two for the "right" candidate.

We had a rough 2010, but it wasn't 1994.  We still have the Senate, as well as the White House.  We've seen major changes in health care, student loans, and financial regulation--and we may yet get the DREAM Act for immigrant students, as well as the end of "don't ask, don't tell."

The future is still waiting for us.  But it's not waiting for us to cry and feel sorry for ourselves.  It's waiting for us to work, sacrifice, organize and stay together.

And, above all, to never, ever go away.  Presidents and Congresses come and go.  The American people and the American dream are forever.