28 Days

Home stretch. Here we go.

I can't tell if it's depressing or uplifting that the most interesting part of the last month of political sparring has been Tina Fey, but alas.... it is the truth. While the VP debates were entertaining for their shock value (doggonit? really?), last night's presidential debates were more or less as expected.

The town hall structure was a definite detractor for McCain, as he is visibly able to move around less and less as the days go by. As long as we're measuring these in coherence of sentence structure and argument formulation, I think most people were dead-on to agree Obama took it in flying colors. Several sites, including Politico's John Harris and Jim Vandehei, thought the whole affair was lackluster and unrepresentative of the state of current events. Agreed, but at the same time I'm not sure what they are searching for to fill their void. Kennedy? Fireworks? In an era where the same questions are asked by every news outlet in every manner of linguistic formulation, one wonders what jarring question or unexpected answer everybody is hoping for. "Boxers or briefs, Senator?"

I would like to believe that most people like myself have also become apalled by the tone of these last several weeks of campaigning, but somehow I think I'm setting the bar too high. I come from a half-Jamaican, half-caucasian Jewish family, and have been preached at--since this entire debacle began over a year ago--that racism in this country would conquer all. It would be nuanced, it would be snide, it would be sleezy, and it would destroy the Democratic campaign and its leader. I have fought my father tooth and nail on this, that with me comes a generation of people that were not alive to know the deepness of the wounds of racism in the '60s; that with me comes a generation able to move past the fickleness of color, for in reality, we are not even conscious of what color distinctions truly meant to people when it defined their every breath, their role in every inch of society; that with me comes a generation of people that would not utter words such as "that one" or "not ready to lead" that draw so subtley and yet so loudly from the Jim Crowe commands to "sit down boy."

I fear November 4th for more than just the sake of this country. More than an election of new government, this election symbolizes the current state of our humanity and the fact that the same standards to which we have lived since the beginning of organized society are still in place. We are perpetually willing to deny the well-being of the many for the good of the few.

I would love to be taxed less and retain more of my money. Wouldn't we all. But this, for me, is what Liberalism is about, that word so tainted by modern politics that it has become the black plague of schools of thought. Liberalism is the willingness to put yourself second, to look at what is best for society as a whole, and realize that ultimately--maybe not directly, maybe not immediately, but ultimately--this will be best for you, as well.

This election has shown the levels to which people are willing to stoop to further their own personal agendas and leave the rest of the world by the wayside. And for that, I am terrified.