Yeah, I'm a ray of sunshine...

Okay, back to what I was doing before I got happy.

This is how I feel about the upcoming election. This is how I feel about the choice we have.

I’m writing about the future.

No matter what, the next four years will be hard. We’re in a war. More and more people want to kill us. We have laws in place that allow authorities to overreact to minor signifiers of threat (lists of books borrowed from the library, for example), while we leave our ports, power plants and chemical warehouses ludicrously undefended. It’s difficult to sneak into the country, but considering how many people do it each year, it’s by no means impossible. But it’s important for the government to know what audiobooks I’m taking out?

But I’m digressing. I have a hard time resisting it--this administration frustrates me in every way, and makes me want to make lists, long lists of clever lies and stupid mistakes. But it’s not what’s going on here and now that concerns me so much.

I started thinking about the Iraq War, and came to the conclusion that it won’t be the last one. This war, and the way we went about it, will set in motion things that will start the next two or three wars, maybe more. More and more terrorists are being born with every gun fired, with every bomb dropped on a mother or a kid. Some of these people my have hated us already—but most of them had better things to do than try to kill us. They had families to raise, businesses to run. But when we kill those families with a show of shock and awe, when we leave their homes and shops in rubble, priorities change. Wouldn’t yours?

And so, there’s more war in our future—five, ten, fifteen years down the line, fueled by old hatreds but fanned by our arrogance and aggression. Some wars will be against states, some sparked by terrorists. Terrorists whose numbers would be dwindling if we were still in Afghanistan, instead of growing at alarming rates. And you and I won’t be fighting these wars. The chances of either of us dying in them is minimal—after all, we’re staying home.

No, it’s your kids, my nieces and nephews, people’s grandchildren who will be asked to fight these wars—and since there’s been discussion of reinstating the draft, they may not be even asked nicely. They may just be given a helmet and a gun, and flown to where the enemy is. This is what the President and the people he appointed have done to their future. Our future.

We don’t have a choice about the next four years. They’ll be awful, no matter who gets elected. But we’re on the brink of something horrible--an apocalyptic future George Bush brought us to, in his scattershot response to Sept. 11. Sometimes, I don’t know if it’s possible to pull us back from the brink, back to safety. I just know that the man who brought us here doesn’t even see the chasm up ahead, and he’s got his pedal to the metal. We need someone who knows where the brake is. We can't stop on a dime, but we've got to end this somehow. Because Bush's plans have led to chaos in Iraq, neglect in Afghanistan and misery at home.

Rob