I imagine the problem is that too many people are disconnected from politics altogether. People who are more concerned about who’s going to win American Idol or when the pictures of Brad and Angelina’s new twins will appear in People magazine, and don’t bother with politics because it’s all to confusing and bitter and stupid and politicians never do anything for them anyway, so why bother.

Could this be a result of the complacency of having decent governance for several decades (prior to W anyway)? Or the decline of the AMerican educational system and the republicans moving us away from New Deal esque values?

The thing is that I wonder what percentage of the “undecided” voter sees things the way that you see them?

Face it: we aren’t going to get the folks who agree with Phil Gramm economics or those who agree with Dick Cheney foreign policy, and we are going to get slaughtered among the “Confederate Battle flag on their pickup” crowd.

But what about the others?

My guess is that this election will be more about “do we join the world community” or do we stubbornly stay apart from it, and I don’t have a good enough feel to know how it will fall out.

I’ve heard isolated stories that some of the old school D’s are thinking about voting R for the first time in their lives (boo) and about some “bubbas” who are really considering Obama (yay!!!)

I suppose that some of this happens in every election.

I have to take a better look at this, but it seems like, for the most part, Greece is the cradle of modern civilization, right? Where our current basic consciousness and society started. Western thinking, as it were. But they play a rather small role on the global scene today, no?

I have always thought of Europe as further evolved than the US. In general. Their society is older, much older, than that of the US, although technically we’re just an extension of them. Dan Savage (generally known for sex column Savage Love) was on the radio a ways back, when I lived in Seattle. And he was expounding on the Puritanical influence that permeates US culture, even today. He had a really good point. That’s where US culture tends to diverge from European culture, in my mind.

So IMHO socially, and particularly governmentally, I have always regarded Europe and its nations as superior, at a more advanced stage of evolution, in terms of societal organization. And I frequently disparaged the US’s overwhelmingly self centered view of society, both as a nation and as individuals. I’ve often advocated emulating one European nation or another – ie. health care, socialism of a sort, transportation (god knows I wish we had their rail systems). Is the EU not more advanced – when you look at it in terms of long term evolution? THeir society, as an advanced Western type society, with organized government and educational and social systems, has been growing itself for a good couple of millenia longer than the US, no?

I think this might be the one thing I learned from my Catholic upbringing. Compassion and empathy, and social responsibility that is greater than myself. For the good of all peoples.

So Obama’s speech makes me respect and follow him just that much more, in general. We are so interconnected in what we do anymore. Stock brokers in the US can now operated 24/7 and watch the Nikkei index and all those other indices. SO many companies are global – they have footprints all over. So many peoples and cultures are global. Especially the US – hello, Chinatown, Little Italy, heck, even Peoria has little cultural enclaves where immigrants from this or that country cluster themselves.

Technology has brought us together, and I wonder, better than the US not desire to be superior. Not desire some form of imperialism. I certainly don’t want it, for one anyway. Celebrating global diversity is certainly fun. And as for global warming, we really, really have to work all together.

Kyl’s statement about the US doing the heavy lifting around the world really pisses me off. Has he forgotten WWII so quickly? or WWI? the US didn’t come into those until late, for sure. Vietnam, we really shouldn’t ever have been there. Ditto the GUlf War and Iraq. So our “heavy lifting” is just that much more imperialistic bullshit, IMHO. THe rest of the civilized world has evolved beyond such imperialism, yes? Save Bush, McCain and Kyl, and Fox News, I suppose.

And this leads a bit into the atheism track. Being a UU also, the “interconnected web of life” really sums it all up for me. Personally, discovering that in UU was “my epiphany.” You can put some kind of higher power, being or consciousness into that, or not. But it would seem that as we evolve further, technologically and globally, that there really is some sort of “interconnected web of life” maybe just with our shared oceans at this point. So world citizenship, atheism, and interconnectedness don’t seem too far apart in principle, maybe?

I wish blog software would make these comment boxes larger, or give an enlargement option, so I could see more than just a paragraph of what I’d just written. I hope this all makes sense/follows well.