Nov. 8 - There's a very famous psychological theory that explains how human beings deal with death. According to the "Kubler-Ross Sequence of Emotions," we first confront our own mortality with denial ("I am not going to die"), move to anger ("Damn if I'm going to believe that lousy HMO doctor who says I'm going to die"), then bargaining ("God, if you let me live, I promise to be a better person and finish “Moby Dick!"), then depression ("I'm so sad that I'm going to die") and end with acceptance ("I'm going to die, but, you know what? I'm all right with it!").

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Like many academic notions, it contains a lot of truth. But like all academic notions, it's much funnier if I take it entirely out of context and use it to describe how myself and my fellow New Yorkers are feeling after last week's election. As a Kerry supporter, I certainly experienced denial ("There's no way a president with a 44-percent approval rating can beat us!") anger ("Damn you, Kerry! Take a freakin' position on something already!") and more anger (How could we nominate a supposedly religious Catholic who couldn't even win the Catholic vote?! How could my party yield the moral issues to the party of war, wealth and waste?).

And I wasn't alone here in New York City, where nearly 80 percent of the voters supported Kerry. Mostly, we were disgusted to discover that our fellow Americans were not our fellow Americans at all, but a bunch of strangers who cite "moral values" as the biggest issue. That made me angry.

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My first reaction to it was: "F*$@ you and your f*%!#@&% moral values!"

My second reaction was: Since when are liberal values immoral? If you take the central issues that liberals fight for—a clean environment, fair wages for working people, expanded civil rights, the rights of homosexual adults to copulate freely—these are ultimately American values. Yes, we liberals sometimes think we know better than you do—but, unlike the president, we don't make it the central pillar of our campaign.

My third reaction was: What good are "moral values" anyway? The five states with the highest divorce rates in the country are Nevada, Arkansas, Idaho, Florida and Alabama—all of them red! And the two lowest? The bluest of the blue: the District of Columbia and Massachusetts (with heathen New York and Connecticut closely behind)!

My fourth reaction was: If abortion is such a big issue to these moral value folks, why don't they support gay marriages—the only abortion-free relationships?

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My fifth and final reaction was: How can these Red States people cite moral values, yet ignore the immorality of a war that has caused the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people? If anyone should be beating the war drum, it should be we here in immoral New York, which has been—and will always be—the terrorists' favorite target. We don't go a day without reliving the horror of September 11—not the abstract, "Wow, that was horrible" horror that the rest of the country (besides Washington D.C.) lives with, but the genuine horror of smelling burnt flesh and watching people jump out of 100th-story windows of the now-gone Twin Towers—yet most of us voted against the president who went to war in our names.

There was no bargaining to be done, but my anger eventually gave way to depression at how disconnected I feel from the rest of the country. I don't want to move to Canada. I want America to move back to me. In my last column, I wrote about spending three days in Ohio to cajole undecided voters to choose Kerry (yeah, lots of good I obviously did), but the most gratifying part of the trip was getting out of the echo chamber that is New York and meeting my fellow Americans.

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Canvassing in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood outside of Cincinnati with its broken pickup trucks and outdoor furnishings that looked like they came from Home Repo, not Home Depot, I thought I was in hostile territory. And sometimes I did feel like an anthropologist cataloguing other species. In a trailer park outside of Reading, I met the species known as Militarus Angerarius, who started screaming at me sometime between the first and second syllable of the Democrat's surname. In another town, I met Moralius Valuarium, who told me she supported everything Kerry supported, yet worried that he didn't share her faith in God. I also met Knowatus Nothingum, who said she was pleased that the Iraqis looted that explosives bunker because it proved that Bush hadn't lied about weapons of mass destruction. And I met Bizarrus Rationalizationus, a cab driver who told me he supported Bush because, "it's his mess, so he should be forced to clean it up."

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But the more people I met, the more I saw that plenty of people west of the Hudson share my American values. One house didn't even have a door (it had fallen off and was propped up against the peeling wall). I knocked on the screen door and saw an entire family, hugely overweight, smoking, drinking beer in the middle of the day and watching Jerry Springer. There wasn't a book in sight. The radio was playing country music, not NPR. But I started my pitch. "Hi, I just wanted to stop by and see if I can encourage you to vote on Tuesday for my man, John Kerry."  Before I could explain why I supported the senator from "Taxachusetts," the entire family perked up. "Of course, we're going to vote for Kerry!" the man of the house told me, his unkempt beard making him look like a rebel soldier from the Civil War. "This president doesn't know what he's doing." He then ticked through his list of incompetence—the failure to catch Osama bin Laden, a tax cut that favored the wealthy over the middle class, the blurring of church and state, the mission not accomplished—and it was remarkably similar to mine.

A few more trips to the heartland and maybe I can get to acceptance. Now, to quote Bill O'Reilly (who was talking about the sexual harassment suit brought against him), the election "is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again."

Gersh Kuntzman is also a reporter for The New York Post. Check out his rudimentary website at http://www.gersh.tv

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