LiveWire

**A Post by Shifra**

TAM VitadMD wrote the following on FaceBook, and she posted it on the TAMWire. She has graciously consented to allow me to reprint it here. My response follows:

A long 10 days of darkness and cold due to destructive wind, rain, and snow produced a certain kind of anxiety and frustration all too familiar living in Westchester, NY. As depressing as that was, it paled in comparison to an even more foreboding darkness of spirit after the disaster of Election Day 2012. That night, in an emotionally crushing but not entirely surprising manner, our electoral resistance suffered a severe setback – resistance to the occupation (“Occupy Wall Street” has officially become “Occupy America”), to the “revengers” (remember the electorate was encouraged to “vote for revenge” by this president), to the looters, the destroyers and their regime. Most heartbreaking is the notion that so many good, decent, hard-working people allowed themselves to be deceived, divided, indeed balkanized, and manipulated by a malevolent demagogue and a documented fraud, elevated and supported by a corrupt, immensely powerful and determined political machine-union thug-media complex… once again. What do they think they won? – Well, the bread and circuses certainly continue in the form of food stamps, political payoffs/paybacks, and sex scandals.

For the half of Americans who saw through the con since the beginning – it’s Ground Hog Day. For the other half – how bad does he need to be before he is stopped? How many more lies will be tolerated? How many more people need to die? How many more trillions? How many more wars?… Well, 8 to 9 million Democrats confronted the reality of their party this time around. Sadly, 2 to 3 million Republicans simply gave up on theirs.

In any case, as the post-election dust settles, it’s a new day. Perhaps this is where we need to be as a nation. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough pain, enough farce, corruption and betrayal – inflicted by both sides of the political establishment…

Dear VitadMD,

Thanks so much for sharing your FB post with the TAMS. One week after the election, I also began thinking of sharing my thoughts about the recent events. I will tell you what the significance of one week – seven days – has for me.

Many of us shared the events of that evening together. I was very grateful for the opportunity to have so many TAMs, and Tammy, in the chatroom. It made the pain of that evening so much more bearable.

As I began to watch the events unfold, I asked my husband why he was not watching the election results. “I don’t have to,” he said, as he worked on a NYT crossword puzzle, in pen. (Yes, he’s *that* good!)

“Oh?” I asked, although we already had this conversation several times.

“Obama is going to win,” he said.

I then launched into my reasoning as to why Obama would lose.

My husband listened, quietly. When I finished, he looked at me, sadly. “Shifra, you give the average voter too much credit.”

Unfortunately for all of us, he was correct.

When my husband and I got married, 43 years ago, we were both very young, and we were full of hope for the future. I guess somewhere in back of my mind, I imagined that we might hit some “bumps on the road.” But never could we possibly imagine that we would have a POTUS who referred to the deaths of four Americans as “bumps on the road.”

The past four years have been very difficult for all of us. And for me – as a wife, mother, grandmother, baby boomer, Jewish woman – I had never before felt “existentially threatened.” But the prospect of four more years — the specter of Obamacare, racial tensions, class warfare, all the regulations, the looming tax increases, the pain that will be inflicted on so many of us – is frightening.

I think the worst moment for me, as a Jew, occurred in April, ’09, when Obama declared that in the U.S., “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.”

So we now have a POTUS who devalues a fundamental truth about our country, that the U.S. was founded by Christians who believed passionately in religious freedom, and who created a country unique in the history of Western civilization. And it is precisely because the country was founded by Christians, on Judeo-Christian principles, that Jews have been able to lead their lives in freedom.

I mentioned that I had begun to think about writing to the TAMS one week after the election. One week – seven days; it is an ancient Jewish tradition that when there is a death in the family, the immediate family members gather together for seven days. It is called “sitting shiva.” (“shiva” means “seven”) The mourners do not leave the house for seven days, while a steady stream of neighbors, friends and extended family visit and offer condolences. After seven days, although still in mourning, we “get up from shiva,” which is to say, we return to our regular routine. It occurred to me that, in a sense, half the country was “sitting shiva.” There was much talk about “the death of our country as we know it,” “the death of our Constitution,” etc. There was also much talk of turning within, tuning out the outside world, not reading newspapers, tuning out the pundits. As one friend texted me, the day after the election: “Please call me in four years. I think I will have to go into a coma until 2016.”

When my mother passed away, it was left for my brothers and my sister and me to “sit shiva.” My oldest brother, much older than I, has so many memories of my parents that I do not have. I want to share with you something he told us then. We had been talking about early memories, and he told us his earliest memory of my mother. He was three years old at the time:

My mother is sitting in the kitchen, sobbing and burying her face in a dishtowel. My brother goes over to her. “Why you crying, Mommy?” he asks. She looks up at him and says, “Because we are going to war.”

That day was December 7, 1941.

The U.S. Navy had been crippled, more than 2,400 American lives had been lost. The German and Japanese war machines seemed invincible. It was a dark time.

But we prevailed as a nation.

Here is what I want to say to you, VitadMD: Yes, on Election Day, we experienced a “darkness of spirit,” in an “emotionally crushing manner.” And we grieved. But I do not believe that all is lost.

I do not pretend to know why things happen, but I will tell you what I do know: God is in charge, and the United States of America is still “the greatest country on God’s green earth.” This is *not* “the end of our country as we know it,” unless we give up. And I, for one, refuse to surrender to the Forces of Evil, i.e. the Left. There is much work to be done.

And so, here are my goals for the next four years:

1) Make sure my family and I stay healthy, so we do not need to rely on Obamacare.
2) Do whatever I can to increase the ranks of the Tammy Army, so that the authentic conservative message can go forward.
3) Do whatever I can to make BroncoBama’s political life a living hell.

And I have a feeling Tammy might be helping us out on goal #3.