Voting Day U.S.A.

It's election day U.S.A.!  Are we all excited?  I can tell you I am.  It's been an interesting week for me in the lead up to the Big Day.  A few travelling Americans have dropped into Olimpos on their various world tours giving me an opportunity to talk politics with some natives.  Granted, 90% of the time if you meet an American outside the U.S., especially a backerpacker, they are liberal Democrats.  Sarah Palin, in one of her shining quotable moments, made it quite clear that backpacking is for them elitist, leftwing, commie-bums and any hard-working, self-respecting American wouldn't waste his or her time trudging around the world on a shoestring budget, mixing with them strange foreign-types.  "I'm not one of those," she says, with typical Palin putsch, "who came from… a background of…you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and…their parents give 'em a passport and give 'em a backpack and say "Go off and see the world…" Nooooooooo, I've worked all my life, in fact I've usually had two jobs all my life, until I had kids - I was not, uh part of, I guess, uh, uh…that culture."

Ah!  One of those people, part of that culture.  You know the types (most of my friends, actually), who worked two jobs so they could buy their own backpacks and passports and plane tickets and Eurorail passes and sleeping bags and hiking boots and...well, you get the picture (painfully if you've ever had to lug around one of those backpacks for any length of time).  Yeah, that culture of exploration and initiative, of mind-expansion and understanding, yeah, that's exactly what the world needs less of, right Sarah-barracuda?  What the world needs more of are teenage girls who get knocked up by their boyfriends and resign themselves to being stay-at-home hockey moms.

So you can understand why the backpackers I've sat around the bonfire with in Olimpos, chatting politics, don't have a lot of...shall we say respect for Sarah Palin and her Republican party.  Sad thing is, most of these guys are too remotely placed right now to vote but each and every one of them is praying, in their own unique ways, for an Obama victory.

I don't know if their absence from the polls will hurt the Democrats.  The way things are shaping up, there could be a record turnout for this election (meaning anywhere in the range of 70%) so the missing spots should be easily covered.  In the past, that's been the Democrats' Achilles heel: they appeal to the younger crowd and the younger crowd has traditionally been the toughest to coax into voting.  But something feels different in the air these days.  America's talented youth are fed up with having their destinies decided by old fogies in the bible belt.  U.S. politics needs a fresh injection of young, intrepid blood.  And today, they just might get it.