Too tired

Okay, let’s get this out of the way early. I was too tired to vote. Take a second and deal with it and we can move on. I spent the weekend in our Nation’s capital painting many, many rooms in a house that hasn’t had any touch ups in a little over 80 years. To top it off, the traffic laden drive home took eight hours and I was greeted at the door with a crying baby. I finally fell asleep at 12:30 only to be awoken at 2:00, and then 5:00 and then at 7:00.

Like I said, I was too tired to vote. And you know what? I feel empowered. All of you out there have been casting your ballots (most of you for Obama from my extremely unofficial tally) and posting the importance of your actions on your Gmail away messages. One friend of mine greeted us all with the sentiment, “If you didn’t vote, kill yourself.” That pretty much sealed the deal on my attitude. I stopped caring about my role immediately.

I live in New Jersey and as I wrote a couple of weeks ago my vote counts about as much as a Democrat’s in Louisiana. So today I exercised my right not to vote. In many ways I made a much more difficult decision than you did. You have known who you were voting for since the summer. I deliberated long and hard and in the end realized I just don’t care or matter.

That being said, should we wake up tomorrow with Barack Obama on the outside looking in I will feel a little sick to my stomach. Millions of Americans will have chickened out and voted based solely on the color of a man’s skin. Say what you want about the strongish week that McCain had, but the truth will lie somewhere in our racist selves. I’m not sure that people lied when they were polled, but as we got closer to crunch time the fear may have started to set in; the fear of other, the fear of them. In the end, change is not something we need, it is something we are already experiencing. If we don’t elect Barack Obama we will simply delay the inevitable and then elect Hillary Clinton in 2012.