Diaspora has been a major theme of this blog -- it's perhaps my grown-up way of reframing good old-fashioned homesickness in an analytical way -- but November 6 was always going to be a day when my heart and mind where about as far away from Shanghai as they could be. Thanks to daylight savings, and the now thirteen hour time difference between me and the east coast, only a few hours of my November 6th will overlap with the polls actually being open in the US (with the exception of Dixville Notch, of course). But that doesn't mean that doesn't take away from the sense of long-distance patriotism felt today, November 6th, Election Day, 2012 in Shanghai.
I think everyone reading this blog knows who I want to win the election, and who I think will win the election. So I don't really want to spend much time prognosticating -- in a few short hours, we'll all know what happens anyway. About a year ago, I felt pretty good about the election, and I can't say I feel any less confident now.
That said, I've always thought that Election Day should be a celebration of something other than Democrat vs. Republican, or right vs. left. We've got 1,459 other days every four years to argue about the relative merits of tax plans, defense budgets, moral imperatives and, of course, social security. On this one day, can't we just be proud that all of this is left up to us to decide in the first place?
The refrain of the past few years has been "Washington is broken." It's hard not to agree with that. There's a lot that needs fixing, and it's not clear to me that either of the two candidates are individually capable of doing that fixing. There is, to be sure, much to descry about the state of American politics. But I, for one, like to take stock of the many and serious issues that plague our system, and thank my lucky stars to have those be the problems that populate our list of grievances.
For more than two centuries, every four years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the leader of the United States government is systematically and peacefully overthrown by the people. Read that sentence out loud, and then go get a map of the world and try to find the other countries for which that is true now, and for which that has been true for so long. I need not look farther than across my desk, at my Chinese colleagues, to find individuals who have never had a hand in the people who constitute government of their People's Republic. To be an American is to have a voice -- regardless of who they support, Americans ought to be on top of soap boxes on Election Days, using those voices as early and as often as possible, screaming at the top of their lungs, just because they can.
Much has been said about how this election will come down to a very small sliver of the electorate -- primarily those who live in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, and Colorado. I worry that such a sentiment, nevertheless true, will discourage some in the other 45 states from voting. Last I checked, the US had a voting rate of about 50%. I find that somewhat disheartening, as I look outside my office window on Shanghai, a city of 23 million people who have never voted in their lives. I certainly do not have a perfect record -- I didn't vote in either of the two elections I lived through in Washington D.C. (of all places), though this was primarily because I didn't want to register for a D.C. Driver's License (a very lame excuse indeed). One shouldn't vote because they can single-handedly affect who becomes President. It's for the down-ticket elections, on which they certainly can have an impact, and, more importantly, to vote is to celebrate one's ability to do so.
So vote, people. Early and often. And for whatever it's worth, this is what you'll be contributing to -- you heard it here:
Obama: 303
Romney: 235
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