The Election Turns Me Into a Pathetic Patriotic Ethnocentric

 I apologize (to myself more than anyone, really), but I’m going to break two of my cardinal rules for political and international writing: Nationalistic patriotic clichés, and “us” and “them” comparisons. They can be hard to avoid, especially as an American watching an election at 4am in Kampala. So if this brief essay comes off like an average Facebook status written by a wide-eyed Westerner just realizing that the local realities of his foreign friends are different than his own perception of events with international implications, it’s partially because that’s how I feel. That and the three hours of sleep make any sort of critical thought a tedious chore at best.

For the first cliché, I’m incredibly proud of the United States, for the first time in a long time. Some of that has to do with the fact that this was the first election I voted in – take that, pretentiously apathetic 20-year-old me! That said, the implications of this election were the greatest in a post-9/11 setting that still sees the populace finding its feet. Of course there has been room for only three elections since then, but a Romney success was a very terrifying prospect to me, on the international and also domestic and social fronts. Conservatives will cry foul on the economy, possibly rightly so, but the fear that I felt in the early hours of the morning, with Florida teetering precariously, was very real. I’m not an Obama supporter by any stretch, but a Romney administration and its novice foreign policy team facing a potential early showdown with Iran was an unsettling prospect; the erosion of rights for women, homosexuals, and every other category of non-WASP would have just been the unavoidable icing on the cake.

So, I’m proud the country voted the way it did. I’m proud of the marriage equality initiatives of Maryland and Maine, I’m proud of the way Romney accepted defeat (quite graciously, given the fact that his campaign team was so ignorantly confident they decided to only write a victory speech), and I’m proud of the way that President Obama acknowledged the difficult road ahead. There is a change of progress in the air as our generation makes greater inroads toward “the majority”, and this election showed that the Republican party is doomed if they can’t shift with the times. I’m sure they will, however, and I’m sure they’ll take the executive office in 2016. These things happen, but today was a day to celebrate the progress of equality.

On to the second writing faux pas: Watching this election with two Ugandan friends who both lived through the terrors of Obote and Amin, and the tumultuous and seemingly never ending Museveni regime, was a joy for me. Having a different perspective on the American political system was a great experience, as was sharing the joy of an Obama victory with a woman in her seventies. Margaret, the mother of my landlord, woke up around 6am to check in on the election, told me she couldn’t sleep out of anticipation, and settled into the living room – her living room; she was letting me watch the election in her house at an un-godly hour – soon after. She stayed glued to the television, with myself, her son and my three roommates, for another five hours, refusing to go to the market until she could watch Obama speak. All throughout Romney’s concession speech, she smiled and commented on how polite the whole affair was playing out; her son joked that if it was Uganda, there would be tear gas instead of miniature American flags held by dejected supporters.

This wasn’t their first American election by any stretch, but the practice of non-violent transfer of power hasn’t occurred in Uganda in 50 years.  It’s coming, whenever Museveni decides to step down, but after living through Hydra’s rule for so long, it’s easy to see their joy in the civility of the whole thing. I suppose I’m looking forward to the day when Ugandan politics trades voter intimidation for super-PACs, and I imagine they are too.