It only took two and half hours. TGF had time to walk home, make bagels, and bring them back before we even made the turn to go onto school grounds. Nevertheless, I got to vote for the candidate of my choice. And yes, I will be obsessively watching the returns during the day and Rachel Maddow this evening.
We should know in about 30 hours what direction the U.S. has chosen to go in. Will we choose expansiveness and optimism or will we choose exclusion and fear? Regardless of which candidate wins the election – either popular vote or electoral college – like all presidential elections in America it comes down to a choice of the lesser of two evils.
Which candidate do you think is going to do the best for you? Which candidate is going to do the least amount of harm to everyone else while doing you good? Those are the only two questions that should be considered in picking a candidate, but I wonder how many people even think about that second one.
And there’s plenty going on besides the presidential election. California is a hotbed of propositions this year: everything from humane treatment of farm animals (Prop 2) to requiring government owned utilities to generate 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010 (Prop 7) to same-sex marriage rights (Prop 8). Florida has an anti same-sex marriage initiative (Amendment 2) on the ballot as does Arizona (Prop 102) where they’re also considering reforms to the payday loan industry (Prop 200). Washington state voters will have to consider whether or not they want terminally ill adults with 6 or fewer months to live to be able to obtain lethal prescriptions (Initiative Measure 1000) and voters in Maryland will pull the lever either for or against slot machines.
Thing of it is, the reason I will be most glad that the election is over has nothing to do with the end of the constant campaign commercials which we’re getting for the first time in a while where I live because Virginia is now a swing state. Nor does it have anything to do with “hope” or “change” or putting “country first.” No, the reason I’m glad the election will be over is that maybe, if we’re bloody lucky, the mainstream media will stop blathering about the wondrous unification between the baby boomers and the millennials.
Of course they’re united; the baby boomers, the most self-centered group of people every to walk the planet, the group that was the “Me Generation” birthed the millennials, the “Right Now Generation,” and are the same people who can’t let their kids go. This is the generation that turned us into a nation of weenies who are too afraid of pedophiles to let kids play in their own yards but instead have to buy a Wii Fit system to so their kids get any exercise.
Is my generation more enlightened than my parents’ generation? Quite likely, yes. We came of age just as AIDS was breaking big in the world and saw the progression of thought from the beginning, from the days when patients had trouble getting care through the days of ACT-UP and on through the 90s when protease inhibitors first came on the scene and gave the HIV positive hope for something vaguely resembling a normal lifespan. And we saw it all when we were old enough to know what was going on. We’ve seen recessions – three major ones, two of which hit us right smack in the beginning of our adult lives – and the current war in Iraq is the second of our adult lives. We’ve seen the cost first hand in the missing faces at our high school and college reunions.
In very many ways, we are the ones with the most to lose in this election: the country goes in the wrong direction and we’re pretty much fucked, stuck smack in middle age, dug in with kids and mortgages and impending college tuition to pay and little if no time to rebuild. Yet we are the ignored demographic, polled and caressed only as part of other subgroups (female? black? single mom? church goer?) that have been drawing media attention.
And part of me resents this, part of me resents the fact that my generation is staggering along, shouldering the burdens that come with middle age without, seemingly, our chance in the spotlight. Yet, quietly, ever so quietly something else has dawned on me: when no one is paying attention to you is the time when you have the freedom to do whatever you please. This is not such a bad thing.
Do you think there’s anyone on Earth who wants a Democratic victory Tuesday more than Tina Fey? Last night marked the fourth week out of five that Fey did her spookily good Sarah Palin. Does the woman ever sleep?
Will the fact that John McCain fairly killed on Saturday Night Live (videos below) make any difference in the outcome of the election? I’m not sure, but I’m also not sure that given that my vote pretty much doesn’t count – really, you think DC is ever going to vote for a Republican – the only reason for me to go to the polls on Tuesday is that there are downticket races (city council, school board, and ANC) that not voting in might make an impact.
A lot of more alert people with a lot more time on their hands have spent a lot of air time and soy ink over the past few weeks trying to figure out who exactly could still be undecided about the presidential race after 20 months of hard sell campaigning. Are they your classic rube – doesn’t read news, doesn’t care to read news – you know, the kind of people who call their friends, or even the local head of a non-profit group they’re a member of, from the voting booth to ask who they should vote for? Or are they lying to pollsters because, truthfully, that’s actually a lot of fun? Or maybe they’re like me, sales resistant and the more you pressure them the less inclined they are to buy.
That sales resistance, I think, is what causes a lot of people to stay home. At my day job I handle the external communications to our membership. Since August 16th we’ve sent out messages to over 900,000 people about one election or another and universally the feedback we’re getting is “Don’t tell me how to vote.” Given that the rule of thumb is that every piece of feedback you get represents seven pieces of feedback of the same ilk that no one bothered to send, that’s potentially a lot of people who just don’t want anyone messing with their own personal electoral process, and maybe they have a point.
While it’s true that the electoral college is totally outdated, we’re not quite ready for one citizen one vote – a society that can come up with iPhone can’t make a secure voting machine? it’s enough to activate the conspiracy theorist in me; on the other hand, I live in the same city that can’t plan for how to handle extra crowds on the subway on Roe v. Wade day and it happens on the same day every damn year – maybe those people stubbornly clinging to their undecided status have just arrived at the point where they don’t want anyone in their business.
We started out with a system in this country where the runner-up in the general election got to be Vice President. Two hundred and thirty-two years later we’re at a point where we’re so inundated with election “news,” tidbits, rumors, and infomercials that it’s virtually impossible to get a quiet moment to consider what the candidates actually stand for (or what they say they actually stand for vs. what the media say they stand for).
The thing of it is, though, that if you don’t exercise your franchise, even if all you do is go to the polls and blindly vote the full party ticket in every race, do you really have a right to bitch about how the country is run? It speaks to the last gasp of the optimist in me that I want to say no.
It’s NaBloPoMo time once again and I find myself with bits and fragments, scattered as I have been all year pondering whether there is any real meaning to anything.
And is it any wonder that question has come up given the 20+ months of blathering we’ve had to live through on the political scene? Positions and accusations and counter accusations and messages have been flying so fast and thick it is surprising that half the American public doesn’t feel – or perhaps they do – like we’ve been in the mental equivalent of a fist fight in a room full of flying glass.
What surprises me, though, about the fact that I’m bothering to do the whole blog posting month dance is two things: the internet has gotten to be an extremely rude and potentally dangerous place, and I’m still not sure after five years of this that I’ve got anything to say.
There will be gyrations here, politics – really, only 4 more days and then the rest of the arguing can begin – frivolity, movie reviews (yes, they will be back) and perhaps some meditations on why the internet is now full of argumentative trolls.
And because the internet is so full of people, comments have been turned off for a while and, indeed, if you’re reading this it’s because you’ve been given access. Don’t worry, it won’t need to stay this way for very long.
So, until tomorrow….
It’s finally real: my niece rotates out to Kuwait today. Her unit will be there for a month then they move to some as yet unspecified location in Iraq.
The bad news is that her orders say her active duty service is for “not more than 400 days” assuming, of course, that they don’t stop-loss her because, well, they’re the Army and they can do whatever they want.
The good news is that her 400 days started when she went on pre-deployment training on 24 September. I’ll be looking at this clock frequently between now and when the latest is that she could come home. Time to put all that wishing power into a lot of blue states on the map next week.