Never have I had a time since 9/11 have I felt so much hope. Hope that tomorrow will be a better day, for me, for my friends and family and for our next generation. The reason why I feel so much hope is that the American people will finally put a sensible person in the white house.
It is with some positivity I say this, and perhaps its contributed by a lot of surrounding factors in my life like finding a job (which is a rare thing you hear nowadays). However, if you were there listening to Joe Biden yesterday, you can really feel the sense that change is coming, and that leaders are finally talking sense. Yes, politicians are politicians at the end of the day. Their scripts were probably written and rehearsed a thousand times before entering the debate. Palin didn’t hide the fact that she remembered what she had to say without knowing what was coming out of her mouth. I mean, what was McCain thinking when he picked Palin?! - but lets come to that later. For a country which has not much history and so much power, it is very easy to see the immaturity and lack of experience shining out even from a 72 year old man who had been through so much.
I am biased - I have to be. I favour education and theoretical sociology more than life experience - and this is a clear fight between the book-smart and street-smart on the campaign trail. On one hand you have Obama who has gone up the education ladder like most of us, graduated from Harvard law school. Then you have McCain, the Maverick who fought in Vietnam (which was really the predecessor of the Iraq war - not the Gulf War - the Iraq War - which even till today I fail to see the moral justification for) who seems to me want to cling onto the “Its so great to fight for our nation, and we must fight fight fight and fight - and we must win.” I really want to grab McCain by the collar sometimes and tell him - Its ok to loose sometimes, and being able to crawl back up is where real victory lies. Going back to my point of favouring theoretical sociology, I mean it is important that a leader knows something about ideology. “Terrorism” as we know it today had been coined by George W. Bush. In effect, it can be seen as a new ideology - another page in our human history. Just like Maoism or Marxism - the fight against terrorism is another force which seems to be dominating the minds of millions, and we can see that we are all social lab rats running in a direction which is bound for the bridge to nowhere. It is important to understand with a clear mind, what has brought us here to this point in history, and how to proceed from here. We can follow this path to self destruction (military intervention aiming to alienate people) or we can follow a path to bridge people together, so to sit down and talk it out. Diplomacy is definitely a key to a better world. See…Iraq and Afghanistan is the ultimate example of the distortion in the meaning behind “an eye or an eye”.
Palin - what is she thinking?? Running the country like a big family in Alaska? See, I have not much taste for The Daily Show or Corbett Report. But I do keep up with the facts (or try to) about American Politics. Little should I care about them, but ultimately, just as we saw on Wall Street, the collapse of a great empire (in which case - today, America is the new British Empire) will ultimately cause instability in the world. We saw what happened to Palestine/Israel, Pakistan/India, Singapore/Malaysia etc. with the fall in British Empire. The ramifications are huge. Yes, as much as I hate American policies (especially Bush policies), I think its important they are in a good shape. Better yet, we have a leader who knows what the world needs and how America can play a role in it. Back to Palin. She obviously doesn’t know anything. I say this because she is really a hockey mom who has a great family and perhaps is a strong woman. Put her next to Hillary and immediately you see what a joke she is. Literally a joke. No foreign policy experience. No real understanding of economic issue (beyond tax cuts). No idea how Washington works (she said it herself in the debate!). Does she even know that Islam exists beyond Islamic Fundamentalism - a phrase which she uses synonymically to terrorism. How oh how oh how can you put that woman as the 2nd most important person in the world??
This is probably one of the most important elections in US history as Biden pointed out, and I hope that the Americans can be smart for once and stand up for themselves and have their reputations live up to the power they acquire. Seriously, may God bless America.