Day: 432
Gallery of Today’s Pictures
With our Presidential election mere days away and the fate of the free world in our hands, it is dawning on me quickly how important this vote is to the world. Every single person I meet immediately brings up the election and how the world is depending on America to make a change or we are all going to suffer, and when the world recovers, financially and emotionally, I would not be surprised if we no longer were the dominate force in world politics and economics.
The crisises we are facing are like nothing we have ever had to deal with all at once before. We are involved in a draining (emotionally and fiscally) war which continues to be touted as necessary, the world economy is failing primarily from our own bad lending practices, and the environment is quickly getting warmer from over consumption.
It is with all these thoughts in my mind that I came across an unnamed Laos-American photographer from Idaho here visiting his extended family. We started talking about photography and after a couple of beers I brought up the voting question…
“I’m voting for McCain”
My heart sunk. Here is a man that at 8 years old swam the Mekong with his parents under threat of a machine gun death if caught, escaped to Thailand and eventually took refuge status in the U.S. and became a citizen. He doesn’t seem like your typical Republican.
When asked how he could think of voting for McCain, and what the Republican party has done right in the last 8 years, he couldn’t think of an answer. All he could say was he was “voting for the party, not the man”. He associated the Republicans with family values and that was his entire voting strategy. He listened to the campaign punchlines, and let his past decisions make his choice. Like someone who was rooting for a particular team and wouldn’t change alliances during a bad season. After many beers later, he and I parted ways, and he agreed to do some soul searching and research before casting his vote, he officially became undecided.
Undecided is still better than a McCain/Palin vote.
Anyways, I’ll be voting Obama from Singapore in a couple days here, I hope you can all go spend a couple hours researching before you vote and at least give some thought to this question:
What has George W. Bush done RIGHT in the last 8 years, and what has he done wrong?
McCain is another Bush and I just hope everyone can see that, or else we might have some real problems on our hands.
Travel related nonsense will return tomorrow.
