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.