Hope's Got Nothing To Do With It

You know you’re getting older when the phrase “how great things used to be” starts creeping into your conversation. Remember when Saturday Night Live used to do political satire that didn’t look like it was written by a ten year-old? When SUV-idling neighborhood moms didn’t gather at the school bus stop like overprotective hens? When the pitcher who threw a complete game was just doing his job?

So went my confidence in the American voter, which hit its nadir in 2004. How could 51% re-elect a man who blundered us into war and was still incapable of speaking in complete sentences? American Idol and America blurred together, and I found myself flipping between Sanjaya and Dubya, unable to tell the difference. So last December, I asked a friend how he was planning to vote in the upcoming election. “I don’t give a shit about that stuff,” he laughed. Was America in an irrecoverable tailspin, caught in the jetwash of its own indifference?

But it looks like I brought out the rocking chair and Country Time lemonade too soon, as voters have turned out in record numbers over the past two months. Europeans who reflexively sneer at our privately-financed, drawn-out election cycles can’t help but admire the populist mechanisms of how American political parties ask the grassroots to choose their leaders. And it must’ve been a blue-ink-finger moment for the liberal in Idaho, or the conservative in Massachusetts, who both got a chance to cast their first meaningful national vote in decades.

My friend’s words still troubled me—after all, how could someone who enjoyed access to a great public education and holds a lucrative Wall Street job not care about who led the country? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his attitude was testament to the strength of a system that remains transparent while generating so much plenty. No doubt he’d care if there was no school or job in the first place.

After seven years of a President who probably blames his high dry-cleaning bills on 9/11, Americans have been treated to an object lesson as to what happens when too many of us choose apathy. And the stampede to the polls demonstrates that we still trust the system to spit out someone better this time around. Some might call it naïveté, but isn’t it nice to know that “Liberty” isn’t just a word stamped on our quarters?

Perhaps there’s hope for us yet.



Editor’s Note: “Jetwash of our own indifference.” That’s just great writing.