Watching C-SPAN2, waiting for Sherrod Brown's vote to finalize the stimulus bill. They've held open the floor for him -- he was at his mother's memorial in Ohio and he's the magic 60th vote. Worth noting that Ted Kennedy can't be there due to his health issues, and of course Minnesota only has one senator right now, meaning that of those 59 Ayes currently cast, 3 are Republicans: Susan Collins & Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Cheers to those three for actually being bipartisan.
I've read through the stimulus (it's on whitehouse.gov) and it will be extremely beneficial to me: in it is the provision that you only have to cover 35% of the COBRA medical costs to get full coverage. This will put my monthly healthcare costs at a little more than what I was paying when I was employed and would actually make COBRA affordable -- and insurance, considering my chronic disease, is vital. There are other good things in the bill (that's just the one that effects my life the most) but a lot of its effects will take a while to bloom, which I'm sure the conservative pundits will have a field day with.
So, like Prudence there, I've been staring at C-SPAN2 and the Senate Floor, waiting for the final vote.
Also there is snuggling 'cause America is sort of awesome right now.
- You Don't Know How It Feels:
cheerful
Years ago, a decade maybe (or more), my teenage self would muse over my mother's generation and the events in history they had been given: the Cold War, JFK and his brother (and all that followed), Martin Luther King Jr. (and all that followed), the moon landing, Woodstock, Nixon, Watergate...protests and events that petered off into a life of acceptance of mediocrity as normal and acceptable. The historic events going on over the years of my life seemed absurdly boring in comparison...I often commented that I wish my generation had something to talk about, something for the history books. All we had a president who got a blowjob.
Then the World Trade Centers fell, and everything changed...but everything stayed the same.
The outrage of the 1960s didn't exist for my generation, so a lot of the fantastic and amazing human events that happened in that time didn't happen again. I'm not sure if it was simply because folks thought it wouldn't make a difference or if they really didn't care...the desires to change our ways, our views, and our government were pushed to the wayside to make way for day jobs, stupid sequels, and big screen TVs.
Simple comparison: Woodstock 1969 and Woodstock 1999. It's the best comparison of the times and the generations that made up those times -- and the different views held -- that you could possibly get. And I'm not talking about the performers.
(Upon thinking this, I realized that Woodstock was 40 years ago this summer. Hell, Woodstock '99 was a decade ago. I now feel old.)
Today, I curled up at home with painkillers and tea, baking away in the kitchen, and I watched the Inaugural Concert on HBO.com (we canceled our cable service due to costs). I watched the dozens of speakers and performers, all proud to be standing at the Lincoln Memorial, each one smiling and absurdly pleased by this moment in history they were a part of. And I watched the crowd, the thousands of people gathered around the Reflecting Pool, each of them smiling despite the freezing temperatures, singing along and cheering and also pleased to be a part of this moment in history.
And there was our president-elect, Barack Obama, himself saying that it was not the history that Washington DC presented that made him proud to be there, but the thousands of people who stood before him and who gave us this moment. All of us, Americans.
And all I could think was, Holy crap, we elected the right guy. How did that happen?!
And maybe this is our moment in history, our chance to do something fantastic...or at least, our moment to be witness to it. Something a bit more significant than "We elected a black guy!" although that is a pretty big step for us as a nation.
I hope we're right.
- You Don't Know How It Feels:
hopeful
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