Speaker for the Diodes

Politics, a mix of hope and fear

I'd hoped to get out during a really low-traffic part of the day, but my body didn't cooperate, so I hit my polling place as the after-work crowd ewas starting. So I had to wait in line for ... uh ... five or six minutes, I guess, since I was out of there ten minutes after I arrived. I'm not thrilled with having a Diebold machine (with no voter-verified paper ballot), but I'm hoping that having Maryland go red would be sufficiently not-credible that they won't try to steal it here.

Every time someone wished me, "Have a good day," I found myself thinking, "This isn't a good day; this is a nervous day. It will become a good day when I hear McCain's concession speech."

Unfortunately, it's going to be a nervous time in the US for a while. I see three possibilities (in broad strokes):

McCain wins and the country shoots itself in the foot over and over while we nervously watch to see whether it's just going to eat itself or become yet another cautionary tale in the history books that nobody heeds when they need to.
Obama wins and we spend four (or better, eight) years with the spectre of assassination hanging over our heads, hoping that the Secret Service gets all the lucky breaks.
Obama wins but gets killed in office, and the US shreds itself spasmodically.

The best of these still means a nervous few years. This is a scary time.

The way I see it, for my beloved country to have a prayer of stopping its disastrous slide, Obama needs to get elected and survive at least two and a half years in office. Ideally, I want him to die of extremely advanced age after serving two terms and having a post-presidential career something like Jimmy Carter's.

I'm also thinking that if Obama serves a term or two intact, the next black president won't face an unusual degree of threat of assassination -- seeing Obama in office that long will make the idea seem less unusual, maybe even less threatening to racists (they still won't like it, but the next one won't seem like the end of the world to them if they see Obama serve out his term without the world ending.

A year or so ago I was thinking that Obama couldn't be elected because an African-American candidate would have to get all the way to the finals and lose, to pave the way for a later one to win. (I was still rooting for him in the primary race, once my first choice dropped out, because I don't believe in creating self-fulfilling prophecies by voting against what I want out of fear.)

All I can say now is: my fellow Americans, please, please prove me wrong, and elect Barack Obama today.

And while I'm spouting off about politics, let me add that I hope the folks facing questions about marriage on their ballots vote to defend marriage ... by not taking it away from folks who only got that long overdue right recently. That is what I see as the true pro-marriage, pro-family position: recognize these families. We need to be moving toward less bigotry in our laws, not more.