Oct 28 2004
in which i finally talk about politics
I’ll start with a story.
In the summer of 2000, I was looking forward to my 21st birthday and simultaneously anticipating and dreading a semester of study in Venice, Italy. I was also kind of excited about the fact that I was finally old enough to vote in a presidential election, although I was a little bummed that my first vote for a president would be via absentee ballot that I would have to mail from Italy, a country not well-known for efficiency in postal service. I remember spending an entire evening on the telephone arguing with my friend Sam about the fact that I planned to vote for Nader, and how that basically meant I would be voting for George W. Bush, a man who we agreed, with all of our early-twenties eloquence, was a “beady-eyed, arrogant fucker.”
By October 2000, I had grown accustomed to la dolce vita — I had learned how to sleep my way through the most vicious of hangovers, I could spend hours basking in the golden Venetian sun and scribbling inanities in a journal, and I knew how to order coffee in a foreign language. After acing my Italian midterm, my roommate Stephanie and I took off for fall break, heading to Rome and Florence, and when we returned, I found my ballot waiting for me in the mail.
Being impatient by nature, I decided that I didn’t care if it was 3 a.m., I was going to vote right then. So I did. I sent it the following morning with a lot of stamps and good wishes, and returned to my carefree life as a student in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. A girl I went to school with was a political science major, and we’d talk politics on occasion. She was pretty dismayed with my Nader choice, but we stayed friends. She told me that her dad planned to call her at midnight Michigan time (6 a.m. Venice time) to tell her how the election turned out, and she said it would be okay if I called her at 6:30 to find out who had won. It was a good deal.
After spending election night having graphic, horrifying nightmares about George Bush being president and leading the country into war (huh), I crawled out of bed at 6:30 and called my friend. She told me that she was too tired to understand it entirely, but that we didn’t have a president because something had gone really wrong in Florida. From then on, we were confronted with American politics all over the place, from screaming headlines across the top of Il Gazzetino and La Reppubblica to questions asked by everyone from our professors to random people in bars. I remember being sick of being an ambassador for my country and its fucked-up election, and saying to my mom on the phone when we were discussing my return to the States, “Hey, maybe we’ll have a president by then.”
And we got a president. An appointed one.
Over the past four years, I’ve faced the putrid economy, looking for work and being both an overqualified college graduate and an underqualified kid. I’ve had health problems and no insurance to pay for the bills acquired in an attempt to get better. I’ve worked in youth service and seen how No Child Left Behind punishes schools with low-achieving kids instead of helping them improve. I’ve had to hear my father talk about the FBI showing up at the mosque where he prays. I’ve gotten e-mails from “patriotic” relatives denigrating Arabs for being evil and out to destroy America. I’ve had friends sent to fight in a war in Iraq, a war that, according to the 9/11 Commission and and the Duelfer Report, was sold to the American public on lies. And one of those friends saw so much horror in that war that mentally, he will never be the same.
And I’m pissed off.
Since summer, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of mental energy on the election. I read the news from several different newspapers and blogs every day. I check the latest polls regularly. I keep telling myself that I have to take a break from it all, but for some reason, I continue torturing myself with the stomach-knotting stress, even though I know that if I get an ulcer it’s not going to help much one way or the other, but I guess I could say that I’m bleeding for Kerry. I have a sticker on my car, and I hate putting stickers on my car. I ask everyone whether or not they’re registered to vote, and I’ve offered to drive people to the polls. I don’t know if I can deal with living in a country where a significant portion of the population believes it’s a good idea to pass a Constitutional amendment that allows discrimination based on whether people fall in love with people of the “correct” gender. (And if you’re from Michigan and you vote Yes on Prop. 2, you’re an asshole bigot. I generally believe that name-calling does no good in any sort of reasonable discourse, but there just aren’t any other words for it.)
Anyway, before this degenerates into a useless rant, I just want to say that this weekend, I’m going to volunteer for a get out the vote campaign because I refuse to sit by and not do anything for something that means so much. No matter what we’re faced with on November 3 — a new president, more of the same, or a long hideous nightmare of accusations of fraud, disenfranchisement and voter intimidation — I’ll know that I did what I could. And that makes me feel better. Just a little bit.
