REFRESH!

Holler at your blogs, your public radio, your network TV, your partisan newspapers, your educational guesses. Information is flying, literally crackling over all these mediums today - election day. I close my browser window and immediately re-open it, thinking that a blog may have been refreshed with a new report from a battleground state or statistical update. Inundated with anecdotes of long voting lines and challengers in Ohio not actually causing problems, I am feeling twitchy, wonderfully twitchy at the amount of electronic stimulation available. It's amazing how different it feels from 2000. Sure, a lot's happened since then. A LOT. Too much. But it's heartening to see that at least one of the big results of four chaotic years is the ability to gorge yourself on opinion and conclusion. A lot of it is chaff. Much of it is not. Good things happen when everyone knows the facts, when it is literally hip to be informed. I find myself in political conversations, trying to impress people with how much I know about current politics (not much in truth). I don't often succeed. But I think a lot of people want to flex fact muscles and that is a good thing. Knowing is now something like 63% of the battle.