Dear World: Sorry About Bush
No, seriously. Very, very sorry.
How sorry?
Well, let America show you
. . . in pictures
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/chronicle/

Wednesday, November 17, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/11/17/notes111704.DTL

It's a movement. It's a phenomenon. It's a Web site. Or maybe it's far more
than that. No one can really be sure. No matter what it is, it's called
sorryeverybody.com http://www.sorryeverybody.com and it expresses, better than any outpouring so far, a sentiment
that's omnipresent and palpable and still going strong, and every single
Democrat and every single Kerry supporter and every single liberal of any stripe
whatsoever probably felt it like a white-hot stab in the heart the minute Kerry's
concession speech hit the airwaves and it undoubtedly went something like
this:

Dear world: We are so very, very sorry. For Bush. For our bitterly divided
and confused nation. For what's to come. Please know that tens of millions of us
did not vote for him. Please do not hate us. Not all of us, anyway. OK, maybe
Utah. Do you know where Utah is? Never mind.

See, not only is half of America still deeply dejected about the onslaught of
Dubya Dubya II, but much of that half wants the world to know just how
crestfallen we are, and just how awful we feel for inflicting Bush and his
middle-finger foreign policy on them like a virus, a toxin, a nasty STD, yet again.

After all, we knew this wasn't no ordinary election. We knew how much was at
stake, how this one represented a sea change in global attitudes, a dramatic
upheaval and reversal of long-standing American ideas of cooperation and
defense and restraint, ideas that BushCo has now mutated into a hollow, kill-'em-all
faux-cowboy maverick attitude, an almost irreversible shift, mostly backward.
Or downward.

But here's the genius part. Beyond e-mail, beyond blogs or radio shows or
despondent letters to the editor or overly verbose progressively insulated Left
Coast columnists who avoid excessive punctuation as they type because it might
spill their scotch, sorryeverybody.com nails the sentiment in a way no one
could have imagined: in photographs.

Or, rather, thousands of photographs. Of people. Ordinary people, grainy and
crooked and funny and amateurish and honest and full of pathos and raw emotion
and wry humor and surprising beauty and you want that connecting thread? That
thing that unifies and makes you feel less alone and that helps you locate
yourself in a country gone mad and lost and regressive? You can do no better
than this.

And so far the site carries nearly 5,000 photos, with an apparent backlog of
over 1,000 more ready to be uploaded and new ones coming in faster than the
site's diverse gaggle of stunned creators -- namely, a sly neuroscience student
from USC named James and his ragtag team of webmasters and designers from
across the country -- ever dreamed. And the reaction has been, to put it mildly,
overwhelming: a whopping 50 million hits to the site so far, moving nearly two
terabytes of information. And growing fast.

And if a picture's worth a thousand words, then sorryeverybody.com is
exploding with a few million very ardent expressions indeed, all echoing the same
simple but heartbreaking sentiment and all, presumably, posted in the hope that
the message will be somehow reach the eyeballs of the world, the countries so
very and rightfully appalled and revolted by our apparent lack of vision.

It seems to be working. Pictures are apparently flooding into the site from
around the world, full of messages of "It's OK" and "Thanks for trying" and
"Just don't let it happen again" and it's even spawned a European response page
called apologiesaccepted.com http://www.apologiesaccepted.com and this is when it hits you: this little gag
site, unexpectedly, wonderfully, with its beautifully simple concept, might have
actually stumbled on a way to do the impossible: it might just help heal our
decimated international relationships and, quite possibly, do more for world
diplomacy that Bush ever could, or ever will.

Is that taking things a bit far? Not really. Sure the site's cute. Sure it's
a bit of a novelty. But it's also illuminating and deeply moving and 50
million hits in under two weeks is nothing short of staggering, and hence the
creators are receiving reams of hate mail from the BushCo Right of sufficient
vehemence and vitriol that it's even spawned a creepy 'n' crude "We're Not Sorry"
countersite, with its handful of disturbing pics of rabid right-wingers
displaying their, uh, raging pro-Bush myopia. So you know James and Co. are onto
something.

After all, sorryeverybody.com has broken the cardinal rule of Bush's bitter
neocon agenda: no matter what the atrocity, no matter the how grossly botched
the war or how insidious the WMD lie or how debilitating the world-record
deficit or how brutal the attack on the environment, if there's one thing the GOP
simply does not do, it's apologize.

But this is what makes sorryeverybody.com so incredibly effective. It does
what no column and no punditry and no news analysis and no Democratic weeping
can possibly do, what the Kerry campaign failed to do, what no amount of verbal
raging into the Void can manage: it puts a human face on the sadness.

A very real face, families and children, teenagers and the elderly, young
couples and homosexuals and many, many disaffected liberal loners who are stuck
like sad beacons way out in the middle of the red states and who desperately
want the world to know they exist, that they're Americans, too, that they did
their best to get the Smirking One out.

What's more, the pics, generally speaking, aren't raunchy. They aren't gross
or hateful or puerile or full of screaming middle fingers or manly gun
collections or people holding large kitchen knives or butane lighters up to Bush
dolls in effigy.

They're just snapshots, candid and intimate and expressive and unretouched
and often rather beautiful, taken in the living rooms and backyards and bedrooms
and small towns of the country.

It's just people. It's just America. "Real" America. An enormous and
enormously saddened half of this amazing country that's trying to reach out to the
rest of the world and get the word out and mend its broken heart like at no other
time in our generation's history. It's an expression of regret for what's
been lost, for what we once were, for what we had hoped to become again but that
has now been, well, at best delayed, at worst bludgeoned into a blind stupor.

The site proves that countless Americans still not only care enough to
apologize for our country's massive errors of judgment, for our blind mistakes, but
also are concerned about the effect those mistakes will have on others. As
such, these pictures are perhaps the finest and most honest expressions of love
for one's country you can find. And if that's not patriotic, nothing is.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him. mmorford@sfgate.com

Mark's column archives are here http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a/

posted by Joshua P. Angell  @ 18.11.04

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