Scars and Stripes Forever

Ah, election day is here again. I liken the past four years to those of college - it seems like they just took longer. More happened. I got married. I bought a house. I had a baby. We had a recession. We got attacked. We went to war.

I questioned my career choices. I mulled four or five and am still working on two. I got a graduate degree. I was asked what I was going to "do" with it. I questioned the ROI of education. I questioned whether people who asked that question should be forced to work retail.

We questioned the U.N. We questioned our position as World Police. We questioned our dependency on foreign oil. We questioned the definition of patriotism.

My family grew. I started worrying about more people than just myself. I realized how helpless it can make me feel to realize I love someone so much I would never be the same if something happened to him or her. I identified with more people than I ever have before.

We went to war without many allies. We went to war with only our ex-mother country by our side. We didn't find what we thought we were fighting over. We questioned the value of information. We said we were fighting over information, but really we made decisions based solely on emotion.

I discovered the value of decisions based solely on emotion, but still hated the war.

The only thing I do understand about politics is what I understand about humanity. There is no good or evil in this world. There are only shades of gray. Where you stand on any one issue is based largely on your own experience or the experiences of those you love, and that's okay. It's amazing that we are able to play out our own lives on a national scale by voting, thrust our own opinions, for our votes are based on our opinions, which were shaped in turn by our life experiences, into the hands of a group of individuals and with that statement proclaim this, right now, is important to me.

I think our system has a lot of faults. I'll be really mad if whomever earns the popular vote loses the electoral college, regardless of the candidate. I'll admit I have my favorite, and he isn't from a place we like to call Texas. However, millions of Americans are out there today telling the world what we think about when, once every four years, we consider something larger than our daily lives. When we value our own opinions for a change.