Can anyone spare some change?

Yes, I haven't blogged. It was a whirlwind of finals, holidays, and heartworms. Still, I have been writing. I'll add more to the mix later, I'm sure, but my home red-state friends are fretting, and I have a response. They seem concerned that we have elected a President for the first time solely based on race. I don't have permission to repeat the exchange that I didn't write, but that's the gist. Here's my response. Am I right?

On Obama's election being a "racial thing" that will "set race relations back":

I don't think it was racial so much as a nation voting for the candidate LEAST like what was currently in power. I think a lack of experience worked in his favor because people are through with what is in Washington now. Neither party had one experienced person who hadn't fundamently screwed this nation to the wall.

George Bush hurt people in this country and the more they spoke out against him, the more his policies reflected what he said he was trying to abolish. His "you're with us or against us" tactics resembled fascism. I'm not allowed to say who but there's folks less than a mile from your folks' house who voted democrat for the first time in their lives simply because they were so sick of Bush.

I don't know if Obama will fix everything, but McCain would have continued the mess we are in.

It's not the war or even the economy. It's the slow deliberate chipping away of everything that's good about this country.

• It's the telling us it is unpatriotic to question governmental policies.
• It's the Patriot Act.
• It's the turning our lives and health into a commodity and then refusing to regulate those who will determine if we live or die, allowing businesses to let people perish to further their own bottom line.
• It's taking Darwin out of the science classroom because of personal beliefs yet letting him run free in EVERY OTHER AREA OF LIFE.
• It's giving free reign to the financial industry that has proven time and again that they need a time out while tying the hands of self-regulating industries like scientific research and academia.
• It's the putting his goddamn hands on my uterus without permission.
• It's the shoving not God but specifically HIS IDEA OF GOD into every facet of life and telling me I'm wrong if I don't see it his way.
• It's the wiretapping and the torture and the making the rest of the world hate us so visciously that if we ever need anything we better hope it's buried under the white house or stumbling out of the Alaskan wilderness because the rest of the world will laugh.
  
  We've gone from being a world power and leader of the globe to being a monstrous force drunk on its own superiority. We're still the best nation on Earth, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from other cultures -- take what they do well and make it our own. IMPROVE rather than thinking we can be great if we wave a flag and say we are great loudly enough.
  
  Today's a good day for me. And even if Obama fucks things up, Wake is still #1 in basketball, so there.