I’m tired.

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I wasn’t kept awake by the results of a heated election. I don’t think, in the grand scheme of things, that one president or another will be the end of the world. I voted. I did my civic duty. I chose my position based on an understanding of the issues at hand, and which candidates I thought would do the best job representing what I personally believe in. In my opinion, this decision was much more difficult than what most people think it was. Other than one particular senatorial election I was able to cast a vote in, the issues of this year’s election were much more complicated than right and wrong.

I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t just vote across party lines. That’s how you end up with a weak nation, split into groups of extremists. I’m against that.

No, the election was a tight one, but it wasn’t directly what kept me up all night.

It was the reactions of people I know that kept me awake.

Hatred and Anger are the Buzzwords of the Day

If you judged our culture by my Twitter and Facebook feeds, the United States is a giant pile of spoiled 4-year-olds. I’ve never seen such a large group of people incapable of winning or loosing with less dignity and grace.

The double irony of the night was the constant streams of “That’ll teach you not to hate, you evil, predatorial asshat,” or “What’s God’s will now, you bunch of racist, intolerant bigots.”

Yes. For some reason, my friends on the left decided that it was imperative to spend the evening screaming hate speech accusing their political opponents of spewing hate speech.

To me, that wasn’t only unnecessary, but it caused me to loose respect for them. It’s a dishonorable act. It’s spitting on your foe once you’ve won.

It’s the act of a child.

It’s the behavior that rips the divide wider and hinders progress.

On the other side of the aisle, I saw a split between a majority of people that were resolved to make the best of four years with a president they didn’t chose and a minority that act like the world is going to go up in flames and that the universe will collapse upon itself as Lord Bamodon, the Malificient arises to consume their very souls.

Honestly, though, the majority is just taking it in stride. Getting increasingly (and understandably) more upset as their continue to be called monsters and demons.

Fox New is Not The Republican Party

I’m just going to throw this out there for my friends on the liberal side: Fox News isn’t the Republican Majority. Judging everyone in the GOP based on what you see on Fox would be like if all Democrats were judged based on MSNBC. Trust me, you don’t want that. These are the representative voices of the people. These are news-entertainment freaks.

Consider: Fox News and MSNBC are to Politics as WWE is to Olympic Wrestling. It’s entertaining, it is a sport, but it’s not serious in what it’s spouting to the world.

The danger here comes from the fact that too few people realize that it simply isn’t fact.

It isn’t even fair to really include certain loosing Senatorial Candidates that I don’t feel I need to name (but may or may not be from my state) in the GOP. They said some truly stupid, hurtful, even vile things, and they were basically shunned by the rest of the party for doing so.

The World isn’t going to end because of Obama

I do want to throw something out there for my more conservative friends that are making a huge scene:

SHUT THE CRAP UP!

You sound like a freakin’ redneck when you say things like, “Doesn’t matter, America’ll end before 2016.”

That is all.

Maybe I Just Roll With Loud, Dumb People

It’s possible that I tend to associate with emotional extremists that are fond of their own words. I mean, that would make sense, given that I am one of those people.

Still, we have a responsibility to be more than that.

We all need to stay classy and united. Honestly, we’re in much the same situation we were in before the Election, only now we have a President with no need to worry about re-election (which is always a good thing), a Senate that is pretty close to 50/50 with many more moderates, and a House that, while still GOP controlled, received a clear message last night about how America thinks on a lot of issues that are important.

I, personally, am positive about the next few years. I think if we can cut out all the Red vs Blue extremist bullshit that we seem pretty damned insistent on allowing to destroy us, we might actually have a chance of fixing some of the problems we’re facing as a nation.