Tomorrow night is the night everyone is waiting for. The night everything has been leading up to in the six months I've been addicted to reading Daily Kos. And I will be on the edge of my seat like any dedicated Kossack, waiting to hear the result.
But I will not have voted. Not at the polls, not by absentee ballot. I will not have donated as much as the price of a sticker to the Obama campaign, I will not have engaged in debate with any Republican voters, and I will not have been involved in the efforts to GOTV.
Hypocritical? Irresponsible?
Not so much.
In the world of the Internet, the concept of nationality is sometimes irrelevant. The news from one country can affect people across the world. And so it is with me, a student at a prestigious British university who, conventional society would have me believe, should have no particular interest in America. Why should I be bothered about the elections of a faraway country? I should turn back to student union politics and such things that actually affect me.
But it does affect me.
It affects me because it woke me up, first of all. My adolescence began with Lady Diana's death and continued through 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq. Like the adults around me, I had learnt to turn off the news-- literally and mentally-- and take in the clichés of cynicism. Politics is incomprehensible. The status quo will always be the same as it is now. No-one in power actually cares about anyone other than themselves. Ordinary people cannot change anything.
And people wonder why young British voters are apathetic?! I believed all of these things because the people in charge of my world, my parents and teachers and friends, told me so. But the buildup to the 2008 elections caught me by surprise. For the first time, I saw people committed to the idea that politics and the system could actually be used for effective good. However this election ends, I am going to seek comparable opportunities in my own country. I believe now that it's possible.
It affects me because of my dear American friend who fell down the stairs in January, and in doing so introduced this innocent and wide-eyed Britkid to the horrific state of the American healthcare system. He couldn't go to the doctor because he wasn't sure if he had a broken bone or not, and if it turned out not to be so, he was convinced he would have to pay. (Edit to clarify: he works a job that does not give him its own health insurance, and he does not have the money.) I had never expected something so shocking of our sister country, our trend-setter country, our counterpart.
It affects me because of another friend who recently married her girlfriend in a beautiful, precious ceremony. She's smiling at me from the photographs of her wedding. And I think of the politicians who want to take away the right of people in love to marry one another, and my blood boils.
It affects me because we follow you. What you fight, we end up fighting. What hurts you ends up hurting us. Not just us. The world is following you. At dinner in college I talk to my fellow students. None of us are concerned with student politics or even Brown and Cameron and their kind any longer. We talk of Bush and Biden and Burner and Bachmann. Did you see this link? Did you read this blog? Did you hear what McCain said? What's the word?-- Tinklenberg! Did you see the video? Did you hear the interview? Did you read the article? Can you believe that the journalists from the Times are still trying to be impartial?
And yet, we can do nothing, any of us lost Britkids, and that's the worst part. It makes no sense to me. In hurricanes and fires and days of crisis there are a thousand different charities fighting to get to me, to break my heart with tales of suffering and siphon away my student loan through my tears. But when the world is on the brink of being changed from the powerless norm that is all I've ever known, I cannot donate a single penny. Because this election is yours and only yours, the websites tell me. Rubbish. It's ours too, and yet no-one will accept that.
I'll be staying up on election night. But that's a pointless gesture, a meaningless sacrifice. I just find it so hard to face the fact that this election is so completely out of my hands.
Dear Americans, then, whom I have never met, and yet whom I love with all my heart. This is my plea to you. Do it for me. Get out the vote with every bit of strength you have.
Do what we cannot, myself and my friends and all the other Britkids from a thousand different backgrounds, who wait and hope. Because we may not be your fellow citizens, but we are your honorary fellow liberals. And we're with you.