The Election from Over Here

It goes without saying that if you haven’t voted yet, you should stop reading this and go make sure that that gets done. Take the afternoon off work, if you’re still at work. Democracy is too important to be left to other people.

If you haven’t read PW’s great post about going door to door for Obama this week, you should check it out. I used to live in the same area, and it’s a pretty amazing story to hear. Can the Bush years really almost be over?

I live abroad at the moment and I wasn’t able to do any volunteering for the Obama campaign, although I would have liked to. It’s fascinating to read PW’s take on the sentiment in the US right now. Living in a small town in Eastern Europe, I don’t feel much of a connection with US news. People don’t know a whole lot about it, and they usually care even less. One of the most interesting things about this election, though, is the fact that my high school students know about Barack Obama. Some of these kids are in the eighth grade they were born in 1994 and 1995 – even Bill Clinton is ancient history to them, above and beyond being the president of a foreign (albeit hugely important) country. George W. Bush is the only US president they’ve ever really known. And over and over, they’ve told me that they think Obama is cool. They don’t even know who John McCain is. (I asked them how old they thought Obama was – they thought twenty-seven sounded like a reasonable age, the bastards) These are not kids who have any interest in politics.

Barack Obama is not going to solve all or even most of the US’s problems. If he wins, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him just getting us back to where we were before Bush. But, talking to people about the election it’s really convinced me that Barack Obama is exactly the president that we need right now. Plus, my students think he’s really cool.