2:59

It’s election day in the United States. It’s also Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of anything…

It’s particularly frustrating being a Canadian and watching this election. Running Punknews in the recent months has increasingly been an exercise in posting political news from organizations like Rock The Vote and PunkVoter, so I’ve been particularly immersed in election rhetoric (the unhealthy amount of network news I watch didn’t help either, but at least I’ve been getting the CBC’s outsider-view from them).

I’ll pull out my favourite quote from the right honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau now: “Living next to you,” Trudeau told an American audience in a speech to the National Press Club in 1969, “is like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Sure, he was talking about bilateral tensions in Canada-US relations, but I think it’s quite appropriate for looking at today’s world.

Except that the elephant hasn’t been friendly or even-tempered with us poor insignificant bastards who make up “the majority of the people on Earth” lately.

So on one hand I’m pacing around worrying about the state of the world and on the other I’m selfishly glad that it’s me who has to shoulder the responsibility of choosing the future of the empire. For those of you that do, I hope you make the right decision to enact positive change, but I don’t envy you.