"Is the view pretty good from the cheap seats, A.J.?"

I've blogged about it before, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that I work with some seriously messed-up people. And I work in the "Philadelphia suburbs," an area that is generally strongly conservative, so you can probably imagine that a lot of the hope and the joy and the excitement that I am feeling has been dampened somewhat by these miserable, self-absorbed fucktards.

Example: Whenever a certain somebody who shall at this time remain nameless but I might get around to identifying them later has to do something they don't feel like doing, like say their job, they've taken to plastering on a fake grin and saying "Yes I Can!" by which they mean "Yes I Can Just Tell You To Fuck Right Off Now!"

No real sense of civic responsibility, that one.

So anyway, there has been a lot of talk around here for the past few days over "communist this" and "collective that" and "the people have spoken" and I really want to get in some people's faces and be all "YES WE HAVE, MOTHERFUCKER!" but I don't feel like being fired right now. So I just stay here in my hole and look at the HOPE poster and feel proud for a damn change.

I just don't understand what people are so bitter about. I was torqued as all hell when W stole the 2000 election -- and, yes, I believe he cheated, and I will never be convinced otherwise, so please don't bother -- and I was doubly pissed when he was re-elected in 2004. But I was never angry at the people who voted for him. Confused, yes, disappointed, perhaps, but never angry.

Tonight, I think, or maybe this weekend when I have a minute, I am going to watch The American President for the 800,000th time, and I am going to re-memorize the Big Speech, and on Monday morning I am going to stand in the courtyard outside my building and shout it to everyone passing:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. ... You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free." ...We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, [the Republican Party] is not the least bit interested in solving it. [They are] interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.

This kind of defensiveness is directly contrary to what President Obama, my President, our President, right now the whole world's President, has asked me to do. Senator McCain, too. I should be rolling up my sleeves, getting my hands dirty, digging in. But why do I feel so often like I am one of the few? Why are so many people, already, trying to hide the shovel?

Look, I don't expect anything to be easy for the next four years, and possibly more. I didn't vote for Obama because I had any kind of expectation that he would snap his fingers and solve my problems and suddenly make me anything I am not already. Everything I am, I was before this election, and I will continue to be, even after we have elected someone else.

I guess what I don't get is, why do so many people who oppose him do it simply because they do not understand him? And why are they proud of that? Where is the failure in trying to be different? We have the technology, we can make it better. YES WE CAN.