Hope is On the Way!!

Werd,
So, John Edwards-style, I am going to tell a neighborhood story of hope in these RNC/Bush/police/unemployed-type times.
So, the other night, after the RNC, we could overhear my neighbors talking next door in their backyard. (If you've been to my house, you know that the yards are tight. Werd.) So, one guy was ragging his wife and two others about how they went to a solidarity protest in Montclair (my neighborhood has gotten hit pretty darn hard during the Bush years and has gotten all radicaltastic). Finally, he started saying of protesters, "Beat them down!" My dad had had enough. He raised his head over the fence and yelled, good naturedly, "This isn't fucking Eastern Europe!"
This got everyone laughing on all sides, and our neighbor Patty (of digging a hole blog fame) told us about the "yell a thon" that night. "When Bush makes his speech you are supposed to stick your head out your door and yell." Okay.....
So, much later in the evening, as I was switching on cable news, I heard a deafening scream, like someone was being attacked. I raced out the door with a hockey stick just in time to see Patty laughing her arse off with a pile of flyers in hand. "I'm gonna wake the whole neighborhood!" she exclaimed. "Nobody sleeps tonight. I'm ringing every bell!" And with that she started off distributing her flyers to the dumbfounded, sleepy block as everyone stumbled out their doors. It was a pretty amazing moment of neighborhood oneness and genuine American discussion as the real people in this country stood on their front stoops and read Patty's flyers.
She had written a poem which had started out as an apology letter to families of slain Iraqi civilians but had continued into a list of evils including the deaths of so many young American servicepeople. It concluded, "It just makes me want to SCREAM!"
"I finished it two minutes before the speech started," she explained. "It just came from somewhere deep down. I'm so angry."
Too bad this is already Blue Country....