So the election is over, and our side lost.

After two and a half years of demonstrating against the war in Iraq, writing and signing petitions, writing and sending poems to each other, sending money to MoveOn.org, and its many brother and sister organizations, registering strangers on the phone to vote, getting on buses to electioneer in Pennsylvania, knocking on doors, handing out literature, handing out poems to people in the streets, slapping bumper stickers on our cars and Kerry pins on our lapels, we lost.

My favorite pin was one that said, "Liberty and Justice for Oil." It made my students, or at least some of them, smile. I explained to my sophomores that they could turn me in to the thought police if they wanted to. Didn't they think that we already had more liberty and justice than we actually needed, and that it made sense to trade some of it in via the Patriot Act for oil? On the street and the subway, people would squint at this pin, and I would check how long it took for them to get it. I thought it was a good litmus test for brains, as good as an IQ test.

Another pin, this one truly wicked, used a photo taken during the president's audience with the Pope. The Pope is sitting in his white dress and skullcap with his head in his hands, while the president sits in a chair nearby wearing the same slightly perplexed face we saw in the Michael Moore film. The caption reads: "It said, 'Abomination,' so I bombed a nation."

Without humor, we are done for. Of course, some things are not funny. One October evening, returning from a day of canvassing in Pennsylvania, a tall, handsome 50-ish man across the aisle from me on the bus recounted the conversation he had had with one woman after asking her if she had decided whom she was voting for and what her issues were.

She: We're voting for George W. Bush. We're Christian people and he's a good Christian man.

He: Okay. Is there anything you might disagree with him about, or feel he could have done differently?

She: Yes. On 9/12 he should have just gone in there and demolished Iraq.

He (after a pause): But you know that the suicide bombers on 9/11 weren't Iraqis. Most of them were Saudis.

She: It makes no difference. They're all the same.

So we lost, partly because the Bush campaign - aided by a supine press and media establishment - successfully played on the fear and ignorance of people like this woman. But do I think Christians, or Midwesterners, or Southerners, are all the same? No way.

I look at the sweep of red on the map, and feel a little bit as if my bit of blue is being pushed into the sea. Then I remind myself that the glass is at least 48 percent full. The land I love is still inhabited by citizens in every state who deplore pre-emptive war, who think reverse-Robin Hood economics is wrong, who believe women's bodies are their own, and who cherish the natural environment. It is a beginning. It is not the end. I think the grassroots activism we have seen, the amazingly exuberant, smart, organized young people who fuel it, and the Web that is its tool, will make a difference in the long run. None of this will go away. My students - some of them who have just voted for the first time - want me to give them Web sites to go to for more information about what they can do.

Probably the state of the nation will get worse before it gets better. Yet now we can hear each other, we can talk, we can plan. I like the Martin Luther King Jr. line that says, "The arc of history is long, but it tends toward justice." And for the immediate present, I remind myself of some lines by the poet Anne Sexton:

"Depression is boring, I think,
And I would do better to make
Some soup and light up the cave."

Twice nominated for a National Book Award, Alicia Ostriker is author of nine volumes of poetry. She teaches at Rutgers University.

© 2004 Newsday

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