Anji had written to me a little while ago about the elections in Australia and the USA -- saying it wasn't a big deal in Australia like it is in the USA. It would be nice if it weren't a big deal here. It's too, too chilling. Before I was divorced I was uncomfortable being legally tied to someone who was out of control -- this is similar. Neither Anji nor I are citizens of the countries in which we live.

I wrote back:
The election here is an enormous thing because of something that's been increasing over the past ten years: polarisation. Because it's a two-party system, the upshot today is that there is one candidate whose party stands for X, and another candidate whose party stands for the opposite of X. We're talking about +-400 million people, here -- a lot of people. About half of them will be miserable and not recognise their country in the political entity it has become -- no matter who wins. The past four years have been agony for anyone who is concerned anout ecological and social issues in an altruistic way. The current power-holders don't even bother to hide their intentions because they have certain knee-jerk issues that will make the enormous herd of religious fundamentalists follow them. Those knee-jerk issues? Abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, separation of church and state. Read this from today's New York Times:

"Archbishop Chaput, who has never explicitly endorsed a candidate, is part of a group of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the church into the elections.

Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues."

To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned."

Non-negotiable issues -- puts this in the same category as the Palestinian-Israeli thing.

Because this country is immense in population, and its military is enormous (there are around 140,000 American troops in Iraq), it's the concern of the entire world when it acts like Baby Huey.