If The Truth Fits

As I type this blog post, the results are starting to come in for the 2008 US election. I’m going to be staying up until this thing is decided, and as Wolf Blitzer just said “its early in the night” on CNN I get the feeling that I could be in for a fairly long night. It would be silly for me to try and call states and inform you about the polls, but the team over at Mashable (a blog about social media and websites) have put together a great list of sites that can guide you through what is a pretty confusing process. They’re calling it the Ultimate Election Day 2008 Toolkit and whilst I haven’t exactly been hunting around for other Election Day Toolkits, if you’re intending to follow the election online it will probably be a very good place for you to go for links.

Whether Obama or McCain is the winner, one thing that has really inspired me about the past couple of days is the level of activism and interest displayed by the American people in this election, resulting in what will probably be one of the highest levels of voter turnout in US history. I know that Obama has energised a lot of voters that wouldn’t have necessarily been too interested, and the McCain has managed to awaken a lot of Republicans, but I still found it very impressive. It almost seems that amongst young people its actually ‘cool’ to be interested in politics and that there’s a bit of a stigma if you don’t vote, which is pretty amazing amongst a voting bloc typically known for stubbornly sticking to apathy.

In Britain I remember things being extremely different in the past couple of elections that I’ve been involved with (I’ve only been able to vote in 1 general election, and a couple of local ones). Voter disinterest and apathy is rife amongst all races, classes, and backgrounds, something which I find pretty depressing. I don’t really know why, maybe people have lost faith in the process, maybe they’ve lost faith in politicians of all ideologies (why bother voting when you don’t believe in any of them?). Or perhaps, and this is a theory that’s fairly ‘out there’, they’re actually all pretty happy, and figure that whoever is in charge things will be pretty much the same. Still, as someone who studied politics at university for 3 years and has had a keen interest for many years more than that, I’ve always believed that voting is important and that if you don’t vote, then you haven’t made your voice heard and you don’t deserve the right to complain about the peopke who represent you. I’m not saying that people who don’t vote shouldn’t have the same human rights as voters, but I feel that there’s something disingenuous about people bitching about their government when they couldn’t even be bothered to send in a postal vote or head down to the polling station.

We Brits and other people in Europe often sling a lot of mud at Americans for a lot of reasons, but its days like this that make me really believe in people, and it makes me proud to be coming to America next month.

Since I’m a Brit writing for an American audience, I feel like I should discuss 9/11 on this anniversary simply because I’m sure its something that’s dominating the media today in the USA and is dominating the thoughts of many Americans around the world. I don’t don’t want to give some kind of faux-patriotic speech though, and I don’t want to be too sentimental either, because I think to do so would be disingenuous. When the attacks occurred I was 16 and in school, thousands of miles away from the plane crashes. I just don’t have a true frame of reference to understand what an event like that can do to a person, a city, or a country as a whole. The July 7th Tube Attacks in London, but I don’t think they had the same kind of impact on the national psyche. Yes, we were shocked, but the images on television and in print lacked the raw horror of planes hitting iconic symbols of America and what it represents. That’s why I don’t feel that I can write a heartfelt message of hope and solidarity without the words ringing hollow.

I can, however, go straight from that above post to discussing stories in the news which have appeared today (what are the chances) that are all related, in one way or another, to the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.

First up, 2008 has become the deadliest year for US soldiers in Afghanistan. I still think that people believe in the invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps initially some Americans looked upon it as a vengeance thing, but in time I’d hope that once people became more aware of what the Taliban did to their own population, that it stopped being an issue to putting right the wrongs of what happened to their own country, but to freeing the Afghanis of Taliban tyranny. I don’t know what has caused the increase in deaths, it could be that American soldiers have moved into more dangerous areas, insurgents have changed their tactics, perhaps more soldiers have been moved into frontline positions, there are lots of reasons why this could be the deadliest year of the war, but its a pretty amazing coincidence that this unfortunate landmark was achieved on today of all days. Oh, and George Bush’s solution to fixing their current woes in Afghanistan? Sending in less people than he’s been advised to… because that worked out so well in Iraq

Second, and related to the “we aren’t winning the war on terrorism” theme of the day, General Petraeus, the outgoing US commander in Iraq, has said that the US-led coalition in Iraq has a long hard road ahead of them, and that ‘he did not know that he would ever use the word “victory”‘ in relation to Iraq. Well, of course he’ll never use the word ‘victory’ in Iraq, he’s about to leave!

Third, McCain and Obama have called a truce to election related sparring to commemorate 9/11 together. I like this, its one of those things that he-affirms your faith in politicians actually having a soul, even if their teams probably decided that ‘working’ on 9/11 would be more damaging to their campaigns than not doing it. According to the AP article they also suspended all campaign ads that were critical of their opponent, so presumably they were still running adverts that said how awesome they were.

Lastly, and with extremely tenuous links to my main theme, it turns out that the US-Mexico border fence is running behind schedule and will cost $400 million dollars more than previously assumed, and consider that they’d appropriated around $2.5 billion for it already. The fence is only going to be 670 miles long, and the border is 1,969 miles long, do they really think that the main thing stopping illegal immigrants is being to lazy to go around it?

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