Mourning in America

By EmmaZahn on Sun, 11/11/2012 - 12:50pm |

By now, most of you have probably seen the Tumblr page entirely dedicated to pictures of white people mourning the Republican defeat last Tuesday.

I realize how easy it is to make fun of those people (our those people), but for me the images posted there call up -- somewhat to my surprise -- decidedly mixed emotions. Spite and sympathy, it seems, can co-exist, and even lay the groundwork for something that begins to resemble empathy.

[...]

In the end, though, what really makes it hard for me to dine with gusto at the schadenfreude buffet is that the grieving faces on the other side of the partisan divide aren't those people, they're my people -- the middle-class neighbors of my Southern childhood, the kids I went to school with, my redneck uncles and cousins, my own mother and father.

URL:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/11/1160263/-Mourning-in-America