Prouder to be an American and one step closer to being home for the 2008 elections. Might we get our “checks and balances” back in order?

I want to keep my blog today short and sweet just like the still to be determined races in Virginia and Montana should be. We don’t need a repeat of the joke elections of 2000 and 2004 where many days and much money was spent to determine the winners and even then the results were and still are in question. It sure looks like the Democrats should win both of these races and there is no reason to drag out the inevitable so I hope that dirty tricks are left aside and the voter’s wishes are heeded. Being seven hours from the East Coast of the US and ten from my Portland it was weird to go to bed last night before much was known in the elections. It was great to wake up this morning and see that the Dems were projected to take the House but since I was gone all day I had no idea that the Senate race was so close. I am sure that many in the US were glad to wake up today and see that the world was still alive and November 8^th didn’t bring the apocalypse down upon them. For some the results of these elections might seem like the devastating end of the world but for me they signal a hopeful beginning.

In 2000 I was saved some of the pain of the elections as I was in Saltsburg, Austria with a little less than a month to go on a 3 ½ month trip around Europe. I just hope that now will be different than then in that I don’t wake up tomorrow to find out the results have been reversed and then go through a ground hog’s day scenario for the next few weeks with the outcome going endlessly back and forth. After that trip when I came home after going to a few more countries had I known the way things would have worked themselves out I might have stayed traveling forever. In 2002, I was in Mozambique about to start my second year of the Peace Corps and at that point had no real interest in coming home and actually felt much safer in Moz than most people in the States were feeling. This only increased a few months later when Iraq was invaded. Then it went from the sympathy we had gotten upon arrival just six weeks after 9/11 to a bit of nervousness about how we would be treated as Americans. This was the time when traveling with a Canadian flag started to sound like a particularly good idea. In 2004 I was in San Diego ready to jump the border for Mexico at a moment’s notice. After the results were in the Daily Show and Air America were about my only respite from the harsh reality brought about by the elections. Now, in 2006, I can begin to think about one day saying again “I am proud to be an American*” and I can certainly walk taller and say at least my country has made a significant step in the right direction. I don’t know that I will be singing the national anthem anytime soon or putting an American flag on my car but right now as we sit on the cusp of a potentially great moment poised to reverse the problems the American government had been creating at home and around the world I can revel in today’s victory and pray for tomorrow’s success

.*I want to clarify that when I say American I mean a citizen of the United States of America. Many in the US and around the world seem to confuse being an American that is being from North or South America and identifying yourself as an American because you are from one of two continents and being a citizen of the United States of America.