7 years and fifty five days ago (I maybe wrong, that's completely not the point) I walked home slowly, I stopped by a newsagent and got something to eat before walking the rest of the way and I really didn't give a fuck about anything at that time. As far as I was concerned the world was a little bit crap and I was having a particularly crap time but that was all there was to it. Then I got into the house and my mother told me 'oh Paul, something terrible has happened'. Around that point I woke up to the world around me. Before then politics and ethics and culture were all things that were there to make me look clever but from the moment my mother said those words the whole world began to matter.
Of course I didn't understand fuck all about what was going on, but watching people die on television repeatedly for the whole afternoon had an impact on me, enough so that I can feel my eyes welling right now.
Back then I had ideas about good and evil that seem stupid to me now but the truth was dawning on me. People, and not just a few but in fact most of the world, are scared.
People are scared that they are going to loose control of their own lives and cultures and jobs and that everything they've ever known will be stripped from them. Years ago I would not have been able to comprehend that kind of fear. It's that kind of fear that drives people to take automatic weapons into schools and aeroplanes into skyscrapers.
I have, one more than one occasion in the past, feared for my own life. That's nothing. There is a worse fear than that: there is fearing for everything. That is the kind of fear that plagues the world and spreads itself so thickly that no one can recall where it came from. I felt a small dose of fearing for everything a matter of hours ago when I saw McCain holding an 18-3 lead, when the light of hope is dwindling and you can see so much less than before it feels like the whole world is getting smaller. For a while as far as I was concerned the student bar was the only room in the whole wide world because if I left it I would not have known what kind of a world I would be walking into.
It's the difference between that feeling and the feeling that maybe things are going to be on the rise that marks how I'm feeling at the moment. I am more relived that excited. Even if Obama is only the lesser of two evils, the idea that the most powerful country in the world thinks that is a good thing makes me feel amazing.
To all my American friends, I love you.
To everyone else, I love you.
This evening or morning or whatever the hell it is, it is history and I love it. We can start thinking about tomorrow now, yes?
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