Voted

The whole world is hanging on the the US electorate's next move.  People here will act like the fact that they know about McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden, Powell's endorsement, "I can see Russia from my house" and all the rest is because they are so well educated in world politics, but it's BS.  The truth is, the next US president will have a tremendous effect on the rest of the globe, and everyone everywhere knows it.  They also all have an opinion.  Not always a well researched opinion, but then again sometimes it's better than what I hear from my fellow Americans.  This president is going to have a major hand in the next steps toward global financial stability, set the stage for Russian, Chinese and European world postures, and decide the outcome of two very long wars.  This president will have the tax base and industrial power of the world's largest single GDP at his fingertips.  This president will have the world's most powerful expeditionary force at his disposal.  This president will say something at the next state of the union address, and the whole world will shiver, bristle, or relax depending on what it is.  This isn't true of Sarkozy, Medvedev, Jintao, Brown, Merkel, Aso, Rudd, Abdulla Aziz, Ahmadinejad (or Khamenei), etc.  These leaders are all varying degrees of important with varying degrees of influence, but the real deal is: the transfer of American power evokes a level of global interest to which other countries (except perhaps Russia?) only engender a distant second.  This much is evident from the media, colleagues, friends, cab drivers, floor to ceiling tube advertisements (seriously) and a million other indicators I run into over here.  I don't know, but I bet that there's a lot more people in the world who wish they could cast a vote in the US election than would ever want to visit the US, let alone become citizens.

The part of the US that I come from has a host of other names up for election on a long list of very unimportant positions... Washington state governor, King county council members, judges, assesors, etc.  No one in the world outside the tiny and insignificant corner of forest I hail from gives 2 shits about these people, or whether or not Seattlites get mass transit, build highways at the expense of their eastern agricultural neighbors, let sick people suicide legally, improve firefighting, etc.  Frankly, I don't care too much about this stuff either.  So, American elections in the broad sense are just as unimportant as those taking place anywhere else in the world: if you don't live right there, it really doesn't effect you and you're more worried about whether it's going to rain today on the way down to the pub. 

But, there is one set of names on my ballot that really does have a ton of impact on everyone back home, all the ex-pats out here in the UK, the English themselves, the folks that fly in and out of London every day from all over the world, and everybody else: Obama/Biden and  McCain/Palin.  Ralph Nader doesn't mean shit because he'll never get elected, and neither do the SWP or the Greens.  They are just silly distractions which serve more to remind Americans of the inclusiveness of their political process than anything else.

So, it was my great pleasure to vote with my wife today, in several ways.

1) Knowing that I had agonized over and considered deeply issues of policy, character, judgement and stance. 

2) Knowing I was taking advantage of a right that many of my forebears struggled and even died to reserve.

3) Knowing I am so privileged as to have the power to cast my judgement on men who will affect the entire world.

This last is clearer to me than ever now that I'm surrounded by intelligent, concerned, informed people who wish they could have a say in this decision, not out of any leisurely obsession with the politics of some random foreign power, but simply because it will touch their lives in the 4 years to come.

 

 

serious work to be done

ok, so we're not SO serious :)