Fibre of the Brain

The bright side of all this mess

The homeless guy who hung out on the stoop by my apartment wanted to talk politics. "Excuse me, ma'am?" he asked as I was walking home on Thurs., Nov. 9. "Do we have a President yet?" "Not yet," I replied.

"Aw shit," he said, and then smiled and shook his head as if to say, "Do you believe these crazy people?"

The country's gone mad, our democratic process as we know it is crumbling, our presidential candidates are acting like sugar-deprived kids who just dropped their lollipops, and, deep down, that homeless guy and I are both loving every minute of it. After enduring endless months of history's most boring and uninspiring election, the total chaos that has ensued is the best result for which we could have hoped—short of the hand of God jutting down, parting the Mississippi River, and producing a miraculous Ralph Nader upset.

I went to bed at 2:30 a.m. on the morning of Wed., Nov. 8 damning myself for being painfully, horribly right when I predicted two weeks ago in this very space that there simply were not enough Jewish grandmothers to hand the state of Florida to Al Gore. I woke up the next morning to find the Jewish grandmothers on the upswing and headed for a possible last minute touchdown. Bush squirmed, Gore had several more heart attacks, Nader reveled in the mess he had created, and the unlikeliest of heroes, Pat Buchanan, perhaps in a search for last-minute martyrdom—or just out of a general desire to mess with George W. Bush, DC '68, for as long as possible—graciously admitted that all those old Jewish women probably did not intend to vote for the guy who had once publicly expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, New Mexico discovered that it, too, had been hasty in declaring a winner, and, on Sun., Nov. 12, The New York Times reported that recent counts in that state showed Bush to be leading Gore by just four votes. In the midst of all of this, even the homeless guy on my stoop, who probably never before gave two shits about Bush, Gore, or any other overeducated rich white guy yelling about reforming a system that had already failed him, wanted to know the same thing everyone else wanted to know: who the hell is going to be our next president?

As I write this, we still don't know the answer to that question. And that's fantastic. Because while everyone screams about butterfly ballots and hand recounts and the anachronism of the Electoral College, just one thing strikes me as truly significant: everyone is screaming. For the first time in over 100 years, the leader of the free world is going to be picked on the basis of literally just a few people's votes. And for the first time since the Civil Rights era, people all over the country are willing to fight for the right to have their votes heard. Gone is the apathy that so soured this campaign and so many others in recent years. Gone is the long-held belief that one vote won't really make a difference. The fact that we can pinpoint the deciding Floridian votes to a few hundred Jewish grandmothers; the fact that New Mexico ballot counters can even talk about four votes as a number that means anything at all is truly remarkable and unbelievably heartening.

Pundits worldwide are watching the U.S. and asking how such a big, powerful country can have so little to go on. They are saying that it is disgraceful that we are not setting an example for other democratic countries by insisting on a process that is smooth and calm. "The most powerful democracy on the planet is now forced to surrender itself to lawyers, like bickering condominium owners," an Italian newspaper columnist wrote with disgust. But perhaps all that bickering shows not how fast our democracy is disintegrating, but how strong our democracy is becoming. For, after hiding behind polls and TV reporters for years, our country of 250 million people has finally done something quite remarkable. It has climbed out from behind its curtain of anonymity, looked a few of its people straight in the face, and said, "your vote counts." And those people, in the twilight years of their lives and well aware of how smooth their lives would continue to be if they just kept their mouths shut and went back to playing bridge, rose to the challenge. They looked straight back at their country and decided to fight to the end to make sure that their votes really did count.

Someone will eventually become the 43rd President of the United States. When he does, the grandmothers will go back to playing golf and the lawyers will go back home and the homeless guy on my stoop will go back to asking me for money. But all those people—and indeed most of the 250 million people in this country—will know that at least for a moment, they were involved; at least for a moment, they were excited about democracy. And maybe, just maybe, when 2004 rolls around, the other half of America who decided not to go to the polls this November will look back on the 2000 debacle and believe, perhaps for the first time, that there is something to be gained from taking the time to vote. Maybe they will finally believe, that, like those four people in New Mexico, and those 300 people in Florida, their vote counts too.

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