We're watching you.
With squinted eyes, baited breath, and sweaty armpits.
To paraphrase Churchill, rarely have the lives of so many depended on the actions of so few.
I barely slept last night. I kept getting this weird dream whereby I was sitting an interview, and there was an angry mob outside shouting and screaming my name. If I failed the inerview, they were going to throw me to the mob. One of the questions, the only one I remember, was "Explain in 6 words why we shouldn't kill your loved ones". Not sure if this has anything to do with the election, though, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
This is without a doubt the most important election of my lifetime. It's going to determine the lives of so many people, it's a little bit scary. For many, this will be the difference between life and death. Litterally. You think I'm exagerating, but I'm not.
If Gore had won over Bush back in 2000, the world would be a completely different place: From Iraq to Afghanistan, to Bali, Madrid, London, from the soldiers of the "coalition of the willing" to the bankers of Frankfurt, from the little kids in sub-Saharan Africa learning about abstinence to the torturers in Egypt, from Ukranian democrats to North Korean peasants, from the orphans in Gaza to the settlers in the West Bank, and for all the little kids, everywhere, the fish, the whales, the plants, the trees, well, in a word, the planet.
On a personal level, I'm not too annoyed that I can't vote. If I lived in the US, I would be in CA or NY or some other Democrat state, so my vote wouldn't matter much anyway. As a subject of Her Majesty's, and a de facto member of the 51st state of the USA, I have faith in my fellow nearly-countrymen. Sometimes that faith is shaken, stirred, bent, twisted, hung upside down and left to dry in the scorching heat of the Nevada desert, but it's still there.
I want to love the US again. Properly "love". Not the kind of love you have for your estranged and heroin-addicted brother, but the kind of love you have for your hard-working, coal-mining, Bruce Springsteen-listening, good-valued, honest, decent, loving dad.
And so do a few other billion people.
Before I end my caffeine-free morning monologue, one last thing: I know that Obama is not the black Jesus/Neo/Asterix. I'm not expecting a revolution. I'm realist, and I know the world won't become a better place overnight. Some decisions will be hard, some things will go wrong, people will die, that's obvious. All I want is for the guy in charge to be an intelligent, compassionate, humanist, decent bloke.
And it's all up to you.
I have faith.
Edited, Nov 4th 2008 10:47am by RedPhoenixxx