party in the uk

I hate election time. I’m not at all original in this sentiment, but I feel it strongly: the elections, especially because we’re so rooted in the two-party system, bring out the absolute worst in otherwise lovely people. 

I’m always sort of horrified--which is a brand of amazement--at the transformation. I was a sophomore in high school when the last candidates started campaigning, and in my junior year the elections fractured the student body. Some things should be said for my environment: San Clemente is in south Orange County, which generally--in the majority--leans to the politically conservative, except for, apparently, the AP/IB students there. I didn’t have strong opinions on who should or shouldn’t be president because I didn’t know anything about the candidates, and was repeatedly questioned by my classmates as to how I could be so apathetic. 

Admittedly, I reacted strongly--I said incredibly stupid things and decided what to believe based upon what other people did and how I felt about it. I was one of four editors for the high school newspaper and the other three were extremely liberal, to the point that fanatics often reach--bullying, forming clubs exclusive to people who feel the same, trying to rename the paper “an island of blue in a sea of red”. I felt--and feel--there is probably something very exciting in that, forming a group with a larger, overarching identity and sticking to it. Trying to make other people believe it. 

My main problems were that: one, I didn’t know anything so I couldn’t make an educated decision to “back” either candidate, and, two, I felt the presence of the “young liberals” much more strongly than any other voice. The high school is large, but my group of peers was small--I partook in a small, academic program which became sort of like a class within a class--a group of 47 students within a class of 750ish. And, not to mention, we were sixteen--an age at which I think even the most well-meaning students at the school didn’t really know what they were talking about. 

You should see my journal from that period of time. I can’t even quote from it because the angst is too overwhelming. I developed the idea that for a group of people who “preached tolerance,” they were quite antagonistic towards dissenters. I think that’s always sort of part of an emerging party, though, if that’s what you can call whatever Obama’s followers were doing at the time.

Since then, I’ve changed immensely. My foundational beliefs haven’t changed in fact, but I think my attitude toward the world and other people and politics and my belief in the actual function of the president have. I didn’t register to vote before I left home, so I didn’t get to vote in this election, so I found myself strangely addicted to watching the votes come in--so much so that I stayed up until 5 AM here in England to see the results. I was actually elated to see what they were. 

I don’t know anything about the candidates, but what I do know is, that despite the struggles and shortcomings of the last four years--all the plans gone wrong and the financial difficulties incurred by plans that were meant to be good for the country--I have had a wonderful, beautiful life. I have felt safe, I have felt faith in a president who is well-meaning, who is a good person, and who is a person who really cares about the individual American. I think that for a lot of people in my area at home, President Obama’s reelection is worrisome--particularly in regards to how his administration allocates federal money--but I would challenge people who are adamantly against this reelection to consider the past four years, and how they really think their lives would have changed--realistically, on an actual, real-life level--if Mr Romney had won. I don’t know much about him or his game besides his ideas of women’s rights--another aspect in which my personal views have shifted drastically since the last election. But I have spent some time contemplating his slogan--Believe in America.

My initial reaction--of course I believe in America, it’s on nearly every world map! But I know what it’s getting at--believe in America, the country, its ideals, its body of good and free people. Believe in the American ideal. But something I’ve learned at college, if anything, is that America’s ideals are always changing, and are much more than a single political party can express. I read somewhere that within the next few hundred years everyone in America could have brown eyes and hair because these are the dominant genes of immigrant ethnicities--and universities are generally a very diverse place. I admit--I don’t know what the real world is like. But I’d feel safer believing in and supporting a presidential campaign that believed in and supported every person, regardless of ethnicity, class, sexuality, or, um, gender. I admit--I don’t know the particulars of the Republican candidate’s campaign, nor his beliefs as a human being as opposed to as a politician. But if I have to vote, and if I have to “err,” as it were, on a certain level in voting for either candidate, I would much rather err on the side that puts the human being at the center--a person’s rights to freedom, choice, and a voice--than that which questions the validity of the rights of someone based on gender or sexuality. 

Let the people of America, I say, believe in America, and uphold their own beliefs in their private lives. I think--well, I actually think that the state governments should have much more of a hand than the federal government in running their territories, but, alas!--I think that the federal government should protect our rights and keep us safe when we need to be kept safe. We’re not always at war--we’re not always going to be a capitalist society--but we’re always humans. 

I realize that this has left out almost all of the financial aspects of these two people’s campaigns, but I really don’t know anything about that, nor would I understand the numbers even if I had them. I think this is how voting works--people choose what they think is important out of what they understand--because nobody understands everything, regardless of how much they believe that they do--and then they vote based on that small amount of information. Sometimes--maybe even a lot of the time--people vote based on the party of their candidate no matter what the person says or believes in. This really irks me--as it does many people--that such an important decision is reduced to, in the lives of so many people, not letting the “other side” win. 

I began this post-rant with the idea of the two-party system. I’ve basically just explained, in a nut-shell, the big problem I see with it, but, just for fun, here’s another--a woman ran for president this year! Actually ran for the position of the President of the United States, arguably one of the most important positions in the entire world. Hilary Clinton, yes, was a leading candidate for Democratic nomination, which was, at least politically, a huge leap for womankind--but this year, Jill Stein was on the ballot, along with two other women. I haven’t been in America whilst the heat of the campaign frenzy was occurring, but did any of you really hear about them at all? How much were they spotlighted in media coverage, how much did anyone hear about them from non-party-funded advertisement? I’d bet that it wasn’t a lot. In England, I didn’t hear a single word about them at all. And, I don’t know, it seems to me that the only reason this is is because they weren’t Democratic nor Republican candidates. (And perhaps because they didn’t say anything dumb about rape.) But, think of it! President Obama made history by becoming the first African-American president--and whilst I think even if he’d run for a different party, perhaps even one of the smaller ones, we would have heard of him because of that possibility--and continues to do so, but women have been on the Presidential ballot for years--since the 1870’s--and nobody really hears of them en masse. I won’t say that it’s because they’re women--I won’t bring up the fact that women only received the right to vote less than a hundred years ago--but I will say that I believe it’s largely because of the two-party system. 

My math teacher, Mr Spears, sophomore year of high school was diagnosed with non-smoking lung cancer half-way through the year and passed away in October of junior year. I remember crying about it on the golf course, and my coach, who was best friends with Mr Spears, comforting me. He was an amazing person, an amazing teacher--he made math exciting to me, and before his class, I had never considered that as a distant possibility. He had a good heart and believed in the goodness of people. He believed the world could change. One day, he told the class, clasping a hand around a bunch of his necklaces, that he wrote an essay in high school about how the best thing America could ever do for itself was to abolish political parties and to vote based on ideas. It seemed like, he said, that way, we’d really get the right guy. And, he thought, usually, the right guy would be someone who didn’t want the job at all, because he realized the immense responsibility and challenges on a deeper level than people campaigning behind the guise of a party would. The position of president would mean something to each of the candidates personally. I still agree with him today, and think of him often when political talk inevitably arises. 

Enough ranting, I think, now that I’ve offended enough people.

This morning, when I finally climbed into bed to sleep, I listened to the British kids who were learning the news, slowly, and then in big groups, that President Obama had been reelected. It sounded like a party outside. People screamed and cried and shouted “Obama won! Obama won!” into open windows. It sounded like someone was banging on a pot or pan with a stick as he made rounds. There were birds singing and I felt truly glad. I do believe that God has something good in store for America in the next four years--even if that thing is not immediately apparent as “good” to everyone--and that he can use the President to do it. 

I’m also--if I’m completely honest--glad that I know what country I’ll be coming home to in a month; that it will still be home.