I don’t buy any of the floated stories that the Clinton campaign continues after Friday. The primary season is over when the polls close today.

So this is the post-everything post. However, if it isn’t also post-neocon, y’all are pretty fucked up.

Yes, as a Democrat, you probably fell in love. It might have been your first love. It might be the kind of lifelong unrequited love that drives poets to their hemlock. Either way, it’s time you knew the truth. Your friends and family and all of mine think we’re irredeemably nuts.

It’s twue.

We just completed a primary season, the longest in history and the closest primary ever. Around the world, less than two years ago, all manner of people looked at the US as a once-promising place that had lost its collective mind by invading Iraq and lost its heart and courage by caving in to torturers and gulag builders and wiretappers, to people who called potatoes ‘freedom fries’ and who threatened the lives of three talented musicians because one of them said she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Caving in to people who said we were ’spreading democracy’ when they were actually spreading something different.

And that global community started to catch on in November 2006 that our long moment of collective insanity was starting to pass. One ‘good’ old Defense Secretary was unceremoniously dumped as a token sacrifice by a president determined to do what incompetent arrogant punks so habitually do: double down, dig in and refuse to concede to do the right thing ever. And blame his critics for his sociopathic indulgences, with all the charm and predictability of a baked bean fart.

What’s happened since, if you can set aside your anger, frustrations and exhaustion to reflect on, inspired hundreds of millions of people. America might elect a woman or a person with brown skin. A majority of the world fits one of those descriptions. The world holds its breath now and wonders if we’re really going to do it.

We’ll look back years from now and realize how truly revolutionary this campaign has already been. Nobody would ever have predicted that two glass ceilings would come under assault simultaneously. And don’t forget our history: two Black Senators from Mississippi between 1870-1881, one from Massachusetts 86 years later, the first Black woman Senator - from Illinois - in 1993, and in 2005 our fifth Black Senator in the 140 years since the Civil War ended. And that man now may become our President.

Within a shorter span of 85 years, 35 women have become US Senators, with 16 of them currently serving, compared to our only current Black US Senator, Barack Obama. Nearly 80 current US Senators have come from America’s largest minority group, white males. Still.

If we were truly affirmative-action-minded, our current Senate would have about 7 Black Senators, 7 Latino Senators, 3 of Asian and American Indian ethnicities, 52 women and 48 men. Parity eludes us, but in 2006, Nancy Pelosi reached the highest level achieved by a woman, second in the line of succession to the US Presidency, right behind the Vice-President.

The ceilings are cracked and crumbling all around us and you’d better believe the world is noticing. And hoping the US can provide fresh inspiration to women and people of darker colors, by returning ethics and competence to the White House. It is that, not the melatonin or estrogen, that will determine what comes next for the world, for us, for succeeding generations, for each other.

Does any of that matter if you’re in love? Probably not.
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Passion. So much in life requires it, yet so much conspires against it. Have you ever loved someone 100% unselfishly, asking for nothing in return except some recognition that you exist, that you think and feel and matter and would fight like a tiger to protect and advance the life of that person you love? I have. I’m a parent.

Somewhere at this moment, in Iraq and Darfur and dozens of places, there are thousands, and tens of thousands mourning the loss of a love like that. Death has stolen their children. Words cannot console them.

It is for passion like that, for the preservation of life and love, that I became a progressive long ago. It is not an easy thing to be too much of the time. A candidate, a policy, an ideal goes down and the hurt is raw and real.

In this primary season, I’ve winced at the slurs and insults progressive people have cast at each other. It hurts as much to know some of the words my own thoughts and emotions compelled me to write caused admired peers and associates to wince in pain or recoil in anger. I want those relationships restored, not to win a contest in November, but just because I value them. A lot.

Love matters. Life matters. I can never yield to neo-cons or older cons. I do not yield those friendships either. An inexplicable madness forced me to lose a child long ago. It broke me. I didn’t know how to survive or even if I wanted to. I’m not a better person for it, I’m just a different person. So I understand the greatest losses anyone can endure, even losses I may not have experienced directly.

I cannot yield. I need to love. I need to be loved. I’m convinced we all do. I refuse to accept any division in pursuit of a kinder world, a place that must be more compassionate and passionate. I can get angry, frustrated, annoyed and confused. We are alive and those are things we all get to feel. And when those feelings subside, I hope we each get to remember why we came to know and admire and respect each other. Daft is a temporary condition in most of us.

I don’t think it’s as conscious a choice to be a progressive as we like to think. I think progressivism chooses us, like kismet. And we have to bear up under the load.
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What we can choose is to remind ourselves that in the world of blogging and commentary, content is everything. And more importantly, we can choose to look at the hearts of mighty fine progressives where divisions have grown and let them know that the content there also is everything that we value. Including the capacity to disagree sometimes.

I reserve the right to be nuts sometimes. You deserve to have that right, too. And even though I fell in love with no candidate - I fell ‘in like’ instead - if my words caused you pain or discomfort, I apologize for that. Both reason and emotion matter. And so do you.
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Update: Here’s another point of view.

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