Rural Dems - Uncommon Guts

It takes real courage to be a blue dot in a red community where this ploy turns out 20% more votes than usual.  And I have nothing but admiration for Judy, Eleanor, Joe Dan, Shireen, Rosemary, Chris, Tim and Gordie all who worked hard and helped out in this Roseland precinct in one way or another. 
I don't have a photo of the beautiful red tent that Chris and Tim brought over.  And I don't have a photo of the gazillion Allen-Yes-Goode signs at this precinct. 

"Hey, you gonna vote for gay marriage? Ha Ha Ha !!"

The outcomes are not so surprising. But maybe I heard comments like that shouted out a few too many times yesterday as voters came to the polls.  So to cold and wet, add brutal and grueling.

For all of you Virginia Dems, especially the folks who stood up in the tough areas - Amherst, Cumberland, Lynchburg, Rockbridge, Lexington, and many more - just in case you're feeling a little mentally fatigued and battle worn today, I hope this quote reminds you that you are not all by yourself and we're in for the long haul.

McCullers wrote these words back in 1953 in a book about racism and homophobia.

Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order.  A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small gray honeycomb, complete.  The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of sward. On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite.  From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation.  The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.

But this is an order foreign to the heart, and to love the earth you must come closer. Gliding downward, low over the town and countryside, the whole breaks up into a multiplicity of impressions. The town is much the same in all its seasons, but the land changes. In early spring the fields here are like patches of worn gray corduroy, each one alike. Now you could begin to tell the crops apart: the gray-green of cotton, the dense and spidery tobacco land, the burning green of corn. As you circle inward, the town itself becomes crazy and complex.  You see the secret corners of all the sad back yards.  Gray fences, factories, the flat main street.  From the air men are shrunken and they have an automatic look, like wound-up dolls.  They seem to move mechanically among haphazard miseries.  You do not see their eyes. And finally this is intolerable. The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes. Even the eyes of the enemy.

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