I'm so depressed

I'm so depressed about the election that I don't know how to get through the day.

Basically, I am worried about how my life--because that's all I can really speak for, my little sliver of reality--will be directly affected if McCain and his completely wing-nut, unqualified running-mate (clearly chosen in a cynical, sensationalizing attempt to get certain voter demographics to the polls) happen to win in November. Here are some ways I can think of:

My daughter and her classmates will not learn sex-ed in high school, as I did. (And by the way, though this is embarrassing to admit, this knowledge did not make me go out and have teen sex, I was a band geek! So maybe if conservatives don't want teens to be sexually active, they should encourage them all to join marching band--but not color guard, they were definitely doing it...)

As a young woman she won't have any access to contraceptives because people will be in power who believe that using a contraceptive is the same as abortion.

My boyfriend will be sent back to Iraq, or to one of the other places McCain will go to war with, and my daughter and I will be left alone for 12-18 months (for one tour? several tours?) or forever.

Nothing will be done to reduce our dependence on oil, safeguard against environmental calamity, and preserve endangered wildlife. People will be tooling around in helicopters shooting at deer.

I wish I did not get so upset about politics. It's just people spouting different viewpoints, and it doesn't mean that everything they envision will come to pass. But it feels to me like the country is going to hell, we continue to be in a war that the majority of Americans do not support, and that people still don't want change, they want the Bush Regime in a new (even more ignorant and dangerous, bouffant-hairstyled) package.

But to get back to the serious points here: it will devastatingly impact me if we elect another war-hungry president and I lose my partner to war, either temporarily or permanently (by the way, has anyone seen the very moving, elegant HBO documentary, "Alive Day," that was made about returning Iraq vets who have lost arms, legs, etc.?). It will devastatingly impact me, not to mention everyone else (doesn't this country support Roe V. Wade by some kind of majority, still...?) if women's reproductive freedoms (including access to contraceptives, for Pete's sake) are eliminated. So much seems at stake. How can my own father be on the fence about who to vote for? He's a brilliant, educated person, but he is genuinely unsure, suspicious of both candidates, considering casting a vote for McCain even when McCain's inflexible policies may deprive his granddaughter of her father. I don't understand how there can be any ambiguity, for anyone who is thoughtful, sensitive, and has been paying any attention at all for the past 8 years. And yet, McCain is up in the polls.

Here is a youtube video for anyone unclear about McCain's intentions and how seriously we should take them:

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=PdJUCU1UH2w&rel=0&eurl=http

Only unstable entities stay alive

This is what I jotted down on a post-it at work yesterday in a moment of dark-chocolate-inspired lucidity and I'm trying to think out what it means. That relationships can't be perfect; there has to be some wobble or uncertainty. I am not sure marriage would ever work for me again becaues it tries to turn an inherently unstable, mysterious, living thing, a relationship, into a fixed institution, a marriage. So may my relationship remain unstable in that sense, uncertain because I'd get bored otherwise. Maybe not all people are like this; some don't enjoy drama. My ex-husband constantly told me he didn't miss the uncertainty and heartache of pining over people, he hated it (though it sure wrung some poems out of him). I found it inspiring--until I experienced it again, after our breakup. I get the impulse to make something permanent but I think that has to happen in art, not in life. Art is the grief that things in life can't be permanent. Poems, too have to be unstable entities. If you've "wrapped up" a poem, either as a writer or reader, it has stopped living. There has to be another dimension we don't see; something hinted at that is richer for not being known, for not being pulled fully into the light of explanation. With my own poems that work, after some period of time, I do feel like I know a lot about them, but often there is one little thing I don't know, and that is where my consciousness can bloom every time I read the poem. Like, what did I mean by, "the black flame holds us in, the blue flame pets us like goats?" No f-ing idea, but that is a spot in the poem where I can feel something for a second. Of course, if a whole poem were made of statements like that, it wouldn't be very good...it's having more understandable stuff around them that makes occasions of irrationality valuable. So, relationsips, poems, politics...wouldn't politics be better if people didn't think they should have some unchanging "national consciousness," like Germans should be blond and strong (in the past), Americans are go-getters and individualistic and spreading democracy...! There should be something built into the political mechanism that allows for the admission of mistakes, at least, but everyone has to pretend they are always right and they always know exactly what they are doing and the consequences. But this isn't my area. I'm just a little poet-in-training with a little rinky-dink spotlight of concern, of things that I know. I don't know much.