This is my promise to you.

If there is some good news in the world tonight, it’s that at least the Jux Entente can stop focusing as much on politics until at least 2006.

Yes, I am (quite literally) depressed about the election. The nation is about as evenly divided as you can get. With only a 1% margin in the popular vote, Bush certainly doesn’t have a mandate from heaven. So what does this mean? Does it mean that we, as a nation, should get back together again? I don’t think so.

A lot of people, including Mr. Kerry himself, have called for everyone to put aside their differences and band together to support the once and future president. After any other election, I would agree with him. But this was a moral election. And, in my opinion, the ideas this country were founded on just lost by popular referendum. A fifth of the states added discrimination right back into their constitutions, something I’d hoped we had seen the last of in the 1960’s. Wounds like that don’t go away. Wounds like the crippling of U.S. scientific advancement and environmental regulations don’t go away. The Patriot Act, most likely, isn’t going away. Are we supposed to forget this? How? Stick our heads in the sand and pray until 2006, when maybe the moderates can wrest control of Congress away?

I’m not a Democrat. I used to be a moderate Republican, but I feel I’ve been kicked out of that party. Now I’m just a social liberal, fiscal conservative Independent, forced to live under a draconian societal administration for four more years while watching the future economic situation in America ruined by record deficits and tax cuts. Forgive me for not waving my little yay flag that Rebecca made for me almost four years ago. Now is not a time to even be sarcastic.

This election wasn’t about national security, it was about national identity. Forty nine percent of us think that America needs to continue to be a bastion of enlightened freedom. Unfortunately, that’s two percent too short.

But I’m not going to talk about that anymore. Instead, I’m going to make a promise to you. Yesterday, I forgot to post the two features by Vivian I promised because of all the election coverage. I’m going to do that tonight. And tomorrow, I’m going back to my old-school, mostly non-political features. There will be no more Bush bashing here on the Jux Entente, unless he does something extremely stupid. I’m either preaching to one choir or pissing off the other, and that’s not the sort of thing I like to engage in when it means nothing.

Two years from now, when things will start getting political again, the members of Jux will all have faced several major changes in their lives. Most of us should have “real” jobs in one way or another. It will be interesting to see how things fall the next time.

So there it is. That’s my token gesture towards healing. To quote System of a Down: Of war, we don’t speak anymore…

(We will fight the heathens, we will fight the heathens…)