Race is almost over
http://resistcomfort.com/votetheissues/
Here we are. Just gone nine, London time. This time tomorrow we’ll all be watching, waiting and, if any of us have got any sense left in us after the media clusterfuck of the last few weeks, praying.
Not to the ‘God’ Sarah Palin believes in. He’s a pretty nasty piece of work, who denies rape victims the right to abortion, and lacks the common sense to put 160 million years of evolution between us and the dinosaurs.
No, we’ll be praying to the gods of decency and reason, the same gods who deserted us so completely four years ago. They’re well overdue a comeback, and tomorrow could be their new ground zero.
A lot’s changed in four years. We’re not as easy to deceive these days and, as Dubya himself might put it, we just don’t scare so easy. We compare notes, sharing information, pooling intelligence, and we know to expect the worst from those who proclaim themselves the best among us.
So it is that now, in the eleventh hour, I find myself toying with a perverse image. I’m picturing all those mercurial McCain spin-doctors, defenders of the indefensible, gathered together this time tomorrow praying that we’ve all critically underestimated the American people’s capacity for latent racial prejudice.
Yup, they’ll know by then that all their hopes are pinned on a dark little secret middle America is more than capable of hiding from itself, let alone the pollsters. It’s a fault line that runs deep through US society, and one that once had the power to stop an otherwise decent person short of even openly acknowledging a man like Barack Obama when they passed him in the street.
With the polling as it is now, tomorrow will tell us if those days have truly passed, and America is ready to become the world’s first great immigrant democracy, bringing the values upon which the country was founded back from the dead in the process.
Race is not an issue on which this election has been fought, but it is now the only issue on which it can be lost and won. Here’s hoping that the knowledge of this will make the taste of Barack Obama’s victory even sweeter.
Tags: election 08
