And the Number One Reason to Vote...

There was a time when I truly believed that the person who sat behind the desk in the Oval Office held the fate of the world in his hand. I think I must have absorbed the grim panic of my parents, teachers, and other adults during the Cuban Missile crisis, an incident that could have indeed meant the end of the human race…even though I was too young to understand what was going on at the time. I remember being physically afraid when Richard Nixon stepped down in disgrace…wondering whether this meant the end of civilization as we knew it.

As years went by, and the world neither ended nor raced forward toward Utopia with the change of Chief Executives, I adopted a more laissez faire attitude toward the presidency. I had seen a truly good man become an absolute disaster of a president. I had held my breath as a washed-up Hollywood actor was handed the reins of the republic, but the world still turned in spite of eight years of that insanity. I watched as an over-achieving, mostly amiable Southern politician took over the post; and was hounded practically from the moment the first oath of office was out of his mouth, by the opposing political party that could not accede to the will of the people and let him BE the president. To the point of nearly having him removed from the office via what amounted to a legalistic coup d’etat. By the 2000 election, I figured that if all this intrigue could be going on at the highest levels in Washington, and I could wake up in the morning, look out the window and see the world still standing, it wasn’t really of earth-shattering import who ended up with their hand on the bible on the morning of January 20, 2001.

And then came George W. Bush. Over the last 3 ½ years, we Americans have been treated to a taste of the havoc that can be wreaked, on our own shores and across the globe, by a truly bad president. I would never have thought it possible that one man could be the force behind so much horrible policy. And that those policies would have so altered our standing among the nations of the world, our ability to voice and appreciate opposing political viewpoints, our tolerance for the diversity that is part of our national heritage, that we truly ARE teetering on the brink of disaster in this country. This is what happens when an affable, academically average, "down-home" millionaire--the front man for a network of power-hungry politicos and business executives—is given (or, more accurately, siezes) the power of the leadership of the free world. All of the people out there who are saying, "This is the most important presidential election of our time" are not just providing a melodramatic sound byte. They are seeing these exact things, and having the same head-slap experience that I am having. We became too complacent. We all believed somewhere in the back of our minds that the matter of who sat behind the desk in the Oval Office was not, in the end, going to affect the world all that much. How wrong we all were, and now we’re paying for it. The world is paying for it. And I am back to feeling that old physical panic, only to the tenth power, about whether the world will still be standing after the votes are counted.