To our future selves

By the time any of you read this, it’ll all be over. Barring a situation like the one 12 years ago, the ballots have been counted. Half the country is dancing and spilling wine on the other half, who are probably curled up on the ground biting their knuckles and drawing blood, whispering, “Forgive them Lord, they know not what evil they voted for.”

I won’t venture to guess which voters, red or blue, will walk on air Wednesday morning, and which will find themselves staring into the middle distance, tracing—with the barrel of a gun—figure-eight patterns against the soft skin above the ear. As we’ve been reminded over and over, polls are as windy and meaningless as they are indicative and intrinsically important. Only fools will sleep easy before all the ballots are counted.

I’m a student choosing to live in Portland. Women and men, gay or straight, regardless of skin color, should have equal rights all the time. I’ll leave you to guess which boxes I checked.

The only important thing to keep in focus, no matter which way you vote, is that this, too, is meaningless.

Symbolically, hiring a bazillionaire Mormon to run the country over a community organizer/law professor who already has four years of presidential job experience will make us look like asses.

Still, there are a lot of people in this country who hear the comforting sound of their own father’s voice when Romney speaks. Their feeling seems to be that four years ought to have been enough time for President What’s-his-name to make hay of the world’s crises. Let a businessman untangle the knots.

Watching the second debate, I started to try to love Mitt Romney.

Stunned (a man apparently unaccustomed to being corrected) when the moderator set him straight on the exact details of the president’s response to the Libyan embassy attack, Romney looked like a ghost punched in the solar plexus.

I could see through the window of his widened eyeballs to the inner confusion as heart and brain, thrashing like whipped animals, fought to reconnect with each other so that he might reboot and continue talking.

Romney, I thought to myself, is probably a good grandfather to his grandkids. Though he and I are never likely to cross paths—unless I end up working as a banquet server at a resort for the very wealthy (again) someday—Romney, I’d bet, would be a pleasant person to talk with. Just looking at him, the shape of his head and the precision of his hairstyle, I get the sense he’s probably never done anything expressly illegal or overtly evil.

I lived in New York in ’04 when we learned that President Bush, despite four years’ worth of proof that he was obviously wrong for the job, successfully defended his seat. The whole city seemed eerily quiet the morning following the election.

New Yorkers in the belly of the subway system usually look ill and harassed, but that morning it was different. Faces hung limp, devoid of expression. Overnight, bad news grayed complexions and further hunched the city’s collective shoulders.

That morning, Brian Lehrer, host of WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, devoted his entire program to keeping New Yorkers from committing mass suicide.

We can guess, but we don’t really know what tomorrow brings.

If Romney wins—though I strongly dislike him, his family and everything people like them stand for—remember: It won’t be the end of the world like it was in ’04, when it wasn’t.