This is the first time I’ll have voted in a US Presidential Election; I only became a citizen in 2009, after all, and so I missed the chance to vote in the historic election of America’s First Black President by a matter of months, somewhat frustratingly for White Liberal Bragging Rights purposes. Nonetheless, it’s nice to feel as if I have a voice in this whole thing after living here for a decade, you know? I am a big fan of democracy and voting and that big ball o’ wax, despite the fact that – as a 38 year old man – I have only ever voted in three general elections.
That’s not my fault, I promise; the 1997 election in the UK was the first one I was able to vote in, and I did – I can still remember a good friend telling me that he’d voted Conservative because, really, they were all the same anyway, and my feeling of I don’t know if I can stop myself wanting to argue with you until you finally admit that you’re wrong as I listened – but then I started doing the Transatlantic thing before the next British election. I remember voting in the 2001 election, but by the time the 2005 one came around, I was firmly in the US and en route to becoming a US citizen.
The 2004 US election, I missed entirely. Obviously, I couldn’t vote, but I wasn’t even in the US for the majority of it; I was flying back to Scotland to be with my family following my mother’s death. I have unhappy, unformed memories of catching a connecting flight in Amsterdam, trying to find a television showing international news to find out whether or not George Bush had won a second term, as silly as that sounds. The 2008 election, we watched avidly from our couch; I remember clearly the sense of Everything will be different now when Obama’s win was announced, as well as mild disbelief that he had actually won.
I admit to having some sense of anticlimax about voting, this time; the way Oregon does voting is by mail ballot, so there isn’t the “entering the booth and punching the ballot” experience at all. I actually filled in the ballot more than a week ago, sent it off the next day, but it’s only really today that I feel as if I actually participated, if that makes sense. Viva Democracy, and may your guy win – as long as he’s the same as my guy, of course.