The media asserts that this will now be an historic race, as the Democratic nominee will be a woman or a black man. It would have been historic had Edwards prevailed though, as no one has ever achieved the Oval Office after serving as a civil suit lawyer nor while their spouse was battling terminal cancer.

The major strike against him, it seems, is he happened to be a white male pushing the most progressive agenda since Jesse Jackson and George McGovern made their runs. The corporate media was not about to grant any room to a guy insisting on reducing the power of corporations over our government. And demographic groups who have yet to break the glass ceiling of the top spot in the nation were simply not going to yield in their quest.

That’s fine and good, as far as I’m concerned, because the sooner each ceiling breaks, the sooner the country can start to address the institutional reforms needed to make our government more representative again. Campaign finance reform, stricter lobbying laws, elected officials held accountable for their crimes, a more sensible primary system, verifiable vote counts and severe penalties for disenfranchising qualified voters remain the greatest hurdles we face as a nation if we will ever again wrest control of our government from the military-industrial-corporate complex that grips it and the deadly plunder it constantly requires.

I’m in favor of any man or woman of any type, color, sexual identity or belief system that makes progress on any of those fronts because I see a world growing warmer and dirtier, governments growing darker and individual freedoms shrinking with the promotion of de-mock-racies by the extremist controllers of capital. I’ve seen these destructive processes at work for the past 40 years and remain convinced we are all headed towards greater tyranny and fascism.

Perhaps it’s necessary to repeat the deadliest mistakes of human existence before we can re-emerge towards brighter days. Perhaps a massive die-off of the human race isa necessary part of the natural order of the global ecosystem. I welcome any person with any capacity - in or out of government - who can lead us towards a more civil world without such catastrophic events. But I remain a cynic so long as greed and fear can be so easily manipulated by the wealthy, the powerful and the superstition evangelicals.

I think Mr. Edwards represented a brighter path forward, offering some resistance to the manifest destiny of authoritarians and the devastating consequences they will bring. It took me several years to become convinced Mr. Edwards offered us a real alternative and I hope we’ll get another chance for a similarly progressive leader sometime in the remaining decades of my life.

I wish the Edwards family happiness, health and peace.

Update: Christy Hardin Smith provides an especially great farewell.