disappointed with the world

i'm actually way, waaaaaaaaaaay too tired and sleepy to infuse this topic with the kind of passion that i felt earlier this afternoon, but i'll try my best, with this raging headache and drooping eyes. >__< okay, serious mode....

today, i experienced my first true political disappointment.

as you might already know, this last tuesday was the special election to fill the spot left by rep. cox, who resigned in order to take his position in the SEC. this was an exciting time, because it was the only election going on in the entire us, and it was right here where i live.

the forerunner in this election was a pretty much by-the-book republican, endorsed by the governator. (campbell) this is orange county, so the democrats basically had no chance of winning. the candidate whom i voted for, brewer, was really the only other viable candidate. She was also a republican, but socially more progressive (pro-choice, pro-stem cell research, etc.). endorsed by mccain, she was definitely trying to garner the support of the academic community, the moderate democrats, and the socially moderate republicans. granted, i don't know much about her personally, but based on the choices open i thought she was the only real option for me.

this is how the primaries in california work. all the candidates are thrown on the ballot, and if there is no clear majority, then it goes to a runoff election in december in which the most popular candidate from each party is represented. that's why i feel, (with my limited knowledge =P)that this election was so important. i wish i could sound more intelligent or coherent, but i'm not a political scientist and it's fucking two in the morning. =P

i found out today from one of my professors that brewer lost. this is the story she told: she asked the people she's currently living with (my awesome professor is a refugee from new orleans!) if they voted, and they both were like, "oh, that was today? i totally forgot!" and she was like, "these people are intellectuals. these are the people she was counting on to vote for her..." she said that she was amazed by the apathy of the us. (she is originally from guyana!) when she said that, i realized that i felt the same way. but i'll get to that in a moment.

i looked it up when i got home. as of now, campbell got 45.6% of the vote. brewer got only 17.1%. so sad. guess who was in third? the crazy, american independent, GOP supported founder of the minutemen project, jim gilchrist. he was close too, 14%. fourteen percent! i guess i really underestimated how truly conservative this part of california is. but the worst part of all of this is that ONLY 22.4% of the registered voters voted. think about that, and how sad it is. i only saw one other girl at the polling place when i went.

after my initial sense of outrage, i wondered... am i making too big a deal out of this? does it really matter who wins? does one representative make any difference at all? and you know what, maybe it isn't that big of a deal, and that's why people didn't vote. but that argument doesn't make sense either!! if ANY election is pointless in california, it's the presidential one. it's pretty much always going to cast it's electoral votes dem so it's not that big of a deal. yet at the presidential election last year, i had to wait in line for almost an hour to vote. clearly, there is something wrong with the picture when an election in which your vote is directly fucking counted finds just two little asian girls in the polling booths. why is it so?

i don't know any friends who voted. granted, many of them are probably not registered in irvine, but many that i talked to didn't even know that a special election had occurred. and i'm sure that a lot of people, esp. a lot of people who could have voted for brewer, were like the intellectual couple my prof talked about and just "forgot." they didn't have time. whatever. almost eighty fucking percent of the population did not give a damn. if tracy, the most apathetic, pathetic, lazy and uninformed person on the face of the planet can get off her butt, turn on the computer, immediately find the polling date and place, and make a quasi-informed opinion about a candidate in thirty minutes, then the rest of the world has no fucking excuse. NO EXCUSE. it's even worse for students... students, who are supposed to be the most passionate. asuci invited many of the candidates to the campus to deliver their platforms and and answer questions. (i didn't go to it... i wish i had) the polling place was on campus in the volunteer center. there is, honestly, no excuse. i feel extremely uncomfortable preaching this kind of shit to people in waking life, but to be honest it really does bug me when intelligent, good people don't care about this sort of thing. maybe it isn't a big deal. but it's still a responsibility, and it's still (even if it sounds corny) what democracy is all about.

in any case, yeah, i'm bummed that 2 out of 2 elections that i have participated in have ended in failure. =) i dunno.... i actually sort of didn't expect kerry to win; i was resigned to that one. but for some reason that i'm not sure of, this one hurts much more.