“I guess your man won last night?” I didn’t know the man, a stranger in town, but I assumed that by “my man”, he meant President Barack Obama. On Tuesday evening I’d been glued to the computer screen watching the election unfold with Great Britain’s national treasure, David Dimbleby on the BBC. When the State of Ohio had been called in favour of the Democrats, Barack Obama’s second term as President had been certain. Florida had still been undecided, but in electoral terms Florida had no longer mattered. Barack Obama was President and the world outside of America, a world that does exist, had breathed a united sigh of relief.
“He’s a liar, not even a legitimate American and he stole the election”. I wasn’t sure which would be ruder, to ignore him or to tell him what I really thought. He was dressed for hunting and strapped across the forward rack of his ATV was a pig, a pig most likely killed with a gun, a gun that was probably somewhere in his Ford F250 truck. In the end, I just nodded and muttered that ‘politicians’ and ‘lies’ were a union to be expected.
“I can’t believe that Romney lost …. In four years Obama has destroyed this country … People have bought Obama’s lies and it’s the end of everything that’s made this country great .. I should pack up and leave while my house is still worth something, before I lose my job …. go and live in Australia or somewhere”.
I wanted to tell him so much. I wanted to tell him that the earth is really more than six thousand years old, that evolution is a real thing and that climate change wasn’t a notion invented by the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing less competitive. I wanted to tell him that rape sometimes happens and that being pro-life should mean caring for the living not just the unborn. To tell him that trickle-down economics has failed, that giving bigger meals to the wealthy will never feed the poor and that universal healthcare isn’t in any way related to communism. He needed to know that house prices were actually rising, that job numbers were increasing and that the deficit was slowly reducing. I wanted to tell him all of this and more, but I didn’t.
I really hoped that he’d just leave me alone, and preferably leave for Australia, a country where they have a female leader, a country where they have universal healthcare and where gay marriage is legal, a country where they have gun controls and more importantly, a country that’s as far away from me as it’s possible to get.
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