[Dialogue] Worth a read

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Kerry supporter imagines the morning after

My stomach lurches at the sight of November 3 on my calendar, and I wonder 
how I will face that day if I awake and Bush has not been sent back to Crawford. 
Will I refuse to leave my bed? Watch CNN all day? Escape at a movie theater? 
Wallow in a crying jag, unable to quite explain to my three young children why 
I am so sad? 

Or perhaps I will take my family on a little drive to Canada, sign a 
four-year lease on an apartment, take up organic farming.

I wonder how many Bush supporters dread that morning as much as Kerry 
supporters if the reverse were true and Kerry is declared the winner.

While I am hopeful for Kerry’s victory (and feel sure that pollsters 
underestimate both newly registered Democrats and Kerry supporters’ fury), I feel the 
need to prepare myself for the opposite possibility. For this moment, I put 
aside the question of a close race, ballot tampering and voter intimidation and 
assume Bush is declared a clear winner. 

I imagine that day, that Wednesday that will continue with school for my 
children, work for my husband and me, a day of appointments, car pools and 
commitments, all with an underlying dread. 

If Bush has won, I will know that this is not, as I had hoped and prayed, the 
end of my work to stop this closed-door, partisan, fumbling and unapologetic 
administration with my words and my actions, but only the beginning. And I 
will know that for another four years I will worry about an America that bullies 
the rest of the world. I will worry about our country’s safety at home and my 
husband’s safety abroad every time he takes a business trip to Europe, Asia, 
the Middle East.

I will worry about my children and how they will pay for the debt that our 
country is mounting. I will worry about how my immediate family will pay for 
another catastrophic illness, following my husband’s experience with cancer. I 
will worry about my friends in the military and their families left behind. I 
will worry about my nephews, 14 and 16, so close to a military draft age. I will 
worry about our country’s pristine wilderness and the health of Americans who 
live close to corporate polluters. I will worry about Americans’ lessening 
freedoms. I will worry about my friends and their families who are barely 
getting by following corporate downsizing. I will worry about black-and-white 
decisions made in the name of God.

I know how I will react if Kerry wins: I will experience that joyful, teary, 
too-good-to-be-true state that will keep my mind checking off issues — Iraq, 
education, health care, the environment, human rights, not to mention the 
United States’ accountability and integrity—all inexorably and positively affected 
by this news. I will celebrate with the thousands of us who have written 
letters, created online communities, shaken our heads in dismay, lit candles, 
cried at ever-worsening news reports, held bake sales and attended record-breaking 
rallies. I know that more than half the country and the vast majority of the 
world’s nations will rejoice as well.

And having thought all of this over, I know that regardless of which outcome 
the morning brings, I will not, in fact, run from reality or bury my head in 
the sand of a sunny Florida beach, but will face the day with friends and 
family who will share my great joy or my overwhelming grief, all of us committed to 
working for a brighter American future. 

-30-

Karin B. Miller is a Minneapolis writer and a member of Mothers Opposing 
Bush. On Nov. 3, regardless of the presidential election’s results, she plans to 
greet friends and family members with a gift of coffee and Barack Obama’s book 
Dreams from My Father.

Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126