Eve of Election Thoughts

Like David Weinberger I can't help but feel a little depressed with where the world now finds itself on the eve of this election. However when I cast my early vote last Thursday I felt a moment of grace and gratitude, knowing that many people died for my right to do so.

I can't help feeling though that all my hopes and dreams, that invariable narrative that has guided my life up to this point, is coming under assault by larger forces of stupidity, ignorance and just plain evil (a word I almost never use). If Bush wins, then perhaps that is what we deserve. Unfortunately we are living under constraints of a single planet where all our lives are inexorably wrapped up in larger forces beyond our control. Perhaps this is why I have instinctually longed for space travel and freedom of the stars where our spirits can manifest themselves more fully, free from the boundaries of this "Planet of the Apes" we find ourselves stuck on.

As I've seen it up to this point, the harmonious balance of nature has been on the side of progressive change, from simple bacterium, to complex living things, to intelligent life, barbarian feudalism towards technological civilization. Will this grand experiment end here? Was it meant to come to a screeching halt because of a few manipulative bastards struggling for total world domination? I want to think that 4 billion years of evolution is on our side, and that hair brained idiots can't hijack our evolutionary birthright... reaching the stars themselves. Therefore I'm uncertain if in the larger scheme of things, if it really matters who wins.