I'm nobody you know. Just another nameless body floating around the periphery. Up until this week, that was fine with me. Because, you see, up until this week, I had faith in America and her system of justice. I used to tolerate politics and liked politicians even less so. Irrelevantly enough, I actually met George W. Bush once when he was Governor of my state. He struck me at the time as an affable fellow and I chalked his grammar tics up to nervousness and an unpolished public voice. "My two twins" and "My wife that I'm married to" were even a tad cute at the time.

At my computer, afforded by upper middle class status, I write this after our Supreme Court decreed that voters are superfluous in elections. All my life, in varying degrees of optimism and cynicism, I believed in the sanctity of the bench. I believed in Justice with a capital "J" and I believed in America, torch and all. I believed that people were people - all equal. That was then, this is now. Orwell's Animal Farm politics have come to roost a la Scalia: all are equal, only some are more equal than others.

This nobody never voted a straight ticket and chose her candidate on issues. Well, okay, maybe once, but that was under duress from my ex-husband, the archetypical republican. Did I mention he was my ex-husband? Even then, in a small and secret protest, I stabbed one independent dot and walked jauntily away from my first experience at the election booth.

No particular predestination caused my liberal bent. Neither abject poverty, the inherent racism of minority, or bias from industry, sport, agriculture, or military colored my thinking. There's no long history of social activism in my family tree. In that tree, live yellow dog democrats, dead Indians (names long whitened to oblivion), survivors and babies of the Great Depression, and veterans of every U.S. military engagement: decorated Confederates, W.W. II flyboys, and one heroic liberator of the concentration camps, who tells wicked Patton stories. Instead of protesting the war, my sixties parents raised babies and surveyed cupboards for one last box of Macaroni and Cheese to make it to payday . For me, it's been a slow slide from a relatively neutral position. Not even a stint working for our public school system, where racism mistook whiteness for racism, could right the left lean. Even that experience didn't kill the fresh-faced innocence or optimism that allowed hope in justice and fairness to remain intact.

As life has shown me more experience, motherhood and age have left their imprint and nudged me, one ideological step at a time, from apolitical and apathetic to socially liberal and financially conservative. The time I traveled to South America, fistfuls of American dollars shoved in my money belt, marked one fork in my journey as I realized that those piles of logs were houses without roofs and that those people were permanent denizens of abject poverty. As I sipped champagne mimosas and shared witty banter with their patron on the veranda of his stunning hacienda, I wondered if the people in his charge had running water. I came to know that there are corporations possessing uncountable liquidity, who donate to politicos and institutions, but not to people who need. I came to know that those same corporations revel in the heterogeneity of golf carts reeking with the testosterone of white men. After that, the search for egalitarianism and equality began in earnest. I looked like an unmoored T. S. Eliot hunting the Wasteland for an elusive morality.

Over time, "Is that too much to ask?" became my personal mantra. A roof, a bed, water, food, a modicum of control over ones life--Is that really too much to ask? As youth faded, the understanding that the age-old adage of "unfaired upon" was an adult reality, too. As awareness set in, I railed at the teacher who, in a single month, taught my three-year old child to pray to her god and to vote for her candidate in a public school setting. He thought he was thanking "a-man" for his lunch, and there was some confusion over whether this Bush fellow was said "man." "Georrrrrrrrgggge Buuuuuush" screeched his tiny voice when I prodded him to explain the I VOTED sticker on his shirt.

He was so proud when he went with me to the polling place and he got a real I VOTED sticker. It's not hard to explain my political philosophy to a three-year old. It worked pretty well and he understood as I got down on my knees in line at the Community Hall and whispered "Honey, George doesn't like to share. That's why." His politics were further solidified when he realized that Mommy and Daddy were mad because George doesn't play fair either. My sweet, innocent son stared unblinking as his parents cursed the television and then fell mute. He exhibited the same reaction to the scene in A Bug’s Life where Hopper is munched by happy little birds. Shock, then fear, as the terrible portents of things sure to reach his world swirl around in his brain.

The realization that lawyers and loopholes are more important than votes infuriates and astounds me. I'm no scholar, but I know simple logic and can recognize circular reasoning when I hear it. A dollar rejected in a soda machine is still a dollar and we assuredly march to a human to get our drink because the blasted machine rejected our still valid currency. A final exam or aptitude test rejected by a grading machine is still a measure of the student's ability. Fairness and common sense dictate that a human intervene and grade the test. Lunacy dictates that we record that student as absent that day because of a wrinkle, an extra mark, the absence of a microgram of paper weight, or the inaccuracy of the aged knives in a perforation machine in a faraway printing plant. Humans promptly credit misread bank deposits to their rightful account, and complain about banking errors not in their favor. Until today, I believed that a full and proper accounting would really happen, votes would eventually be counted, and that the will of the American people via their ballot had infinite value. Truth is, it's got less value than a wrinkled, tired old dollar spat from a shiny soda machine.

There have been assaults on my independent status by frothing partisans at every turn of my journey to Reluctant Partisan. This is ironic, really, since I voted for neither candidate. These nasty and hegemonic incidents happened in the grocery store, in my living room, at my university, at my son's school, on the telephone, and in the workplace. Have you ever noticed that the majority has a tendency to foist their rabid opinion upon the minority in situations where a power differential exists? The worst partisan assaults came by email. I received an attached editorial cartoon showing a depiction of naked Jewish women being herded into a ditch by Nazis with guns. Pan right and they are all dead. A bright red caption reads, "Can you imagine what would have happened if they had had guns?" Stunned, I feebly noted that not even the Socialist candidate in the current election wanted to send jackbooted thugs to prise 22s and deer guns out of the hands of Americans. The message suggested by this editorial is that Democrats are Nazis.

Is this the polemic that fuels the Republican Party and this election? Revolting! This particular Internet campaign also commits unspeakable offense to the Jewish, Romani, and Quaker souls lost to Hitler in the Holocaust and Porrajmos. Perhaps the perpetrators of this blatant propaganda would be interested to note that the Bush family managed financial operations in Nazi Germany that were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Tarpley and Chaitkin charge in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography that the Bush family fortune is largely due to their "central role in financing and arming Adolph Hitler for his takeover of Germany." Quick! Somebody tell GunThruths.com!

I am a citizen. I must do something. I have arrived and I am mad. Maybe a "Welcome to Partisan Politics" party is in order. Today was a day of firsts for me. I sent my first telegram to a Justice, committed money and time to a political party, bought a political bumper sticker, and wrote a letter to a conservative paper. "Wealth is for helping" goes my theory, but I've never considered politics a legitimate form of charity, until now. I apologize in advance to the 7th graders who won't get new instruments this year - those bucks just got rerouted. The cynic in me tells me that it is all for naught, but I feel compelled. Tomorrow, the transfer of stocks to ideologically compatible companies commences.

Today, I pledged that my son will never be a lazy citizen, wallowing in the warmth of civic ignorance. Never will he be apolitical. I'm sorry. I apologize. And, I promise that I will do better. I offer this oath: I solemnly swear that I will use every ounce of energy and every disposable penny to fight the good fight for the rest of my natural little life -- so help me, George W. Bush. A-man. I will accost and convert every college student in my reach, leaving no opportunity wasted. I'll be relentless and ubiquitous, and I can only that hope the mountebanks that run the Republican machine rue the day that they took innocence from the people and finagled the capital "J" out of justice. Unsuspecting Girl Scouts will get a passionate civics lesson for a box of cookies and Boy Scouts will part, their box no lighter.

I believed in fair elections, counting votes, and an independent bench. I believed in an election process that is free of violence and intimidation. Somehow, until today, I believed that America was different from dictatorships in which control of the institutions is more important than the will of the people. I thought fairness and justice superceded all else. That's why I have advocated, from the beginning of this controversy, that equal standard should apply and every vote should be counted. America and the world would have--and should have--waited until a legitimate winner was declared by fair and equitable means. I wouldn't even have minded an obnoxiously late swearing in ceremony. Deadlines be damned.

But, know this, my family is damaged by this polarization, and my trust of America, her system, and her courts is shattered. Nothing can change that now. Actually a win for Gore would have left me only a wee bit less apoplectic than a Gore loss. In reality, these two candidates had to dig deep to find actual differences for the spin machines to feed the public. Hysterical ideology is typically constructed and this time is no different. The most amazing part is that the public believes Gore to be an environmentalist and that lost him votes in breadbasket America. Neither capitalism nor centrism are positive concepts in their pure forms.

I'm sorry. Let me apologize to the Americans that I let down. I beg forgiveness from the world on behalf of Americans for the palpable hypocrisy created by advocating a fair recount for Costunica and then proudly declaring that our votes should be ignored. The inability of the Florida Legislature and the Florida Secretary of State to properly discharge their duties through shenanigans, partisanship, and simple incompetence won't cover that fact. Obstructionism shined white hot from the final ruling of the Supreme Court to award the election to Bush. Will the following please consider granting me mercy? The Muslim who will be unveiled and the pagan or atheist who will be harassed in public school and forced to endure "Jesus Day." The poor and the oppressed across the globe who will become even more poor and oppressed. The elderly for enduring the choice between food and medicine. Alaskans who will lose their homes as the tundra melts and endure the rape of their oil-rich soil. The farmers whose fields become infertile from corporate chemicals brokered by Washington and the Farm Bureau. The people who will lose their homes in the inevitable and predictable recession. The minorities whose districts will be redrawn to reduce their already prosecutable, unequal political power. The innocent and guilty alike, whose government-sponsored deaths will be publicized to millions of cheering righteous. The child who will sew our goods and to the child whose father will die in the coal mine. The public school students who will be forgotten in the scramble of upper middle class hands grasping for vouchers to private institutions. The people of Chile whose children cannot go outside.

I apologize to my son, who will grow up in an extended family raucously divided by politics. Uniter? Bah! And with sincerity, I apologize to my husband, who was right when he chided me to go to vote that fateful day. But most importantly, I beg forgiveness of Ann Richards. She was salty and hard and called George "some jerk." I was young and naïve then and found her mean and uncivil. My civic laziness is unforgivable. Hindsight tells me only idiots insist on civility in American politics. So, America should know it's my fault. I should have voted for Ann when I had the chance.

No one else is standing in judgment to take responsibility for this unAmerican tragedy of errors--moral and legal--that this election has indelibly rendered. America seems unaware that she slipped clear off that slope and fell irretrievably headlong into moral relativity again.

It is possible that the journey to Reluctant Partisan has a silver lining. I'm somebody now: a woman with a cause. And, my son was my first convert. He's enthusiastic: "Alllllllll Gooooooore!" Whatever happens, my son will know that America and her voters were "unfaired upon". All I'm left with is a silver lining. George can keep his silver chad and his daddy can keep his silver foot. At least then I'll have something in common with them.

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