The big day.  The big day-a-reno.  What's next?  With two possible options, that from where I'm standing seem worlds apart, what do we do with either result?

I've said it myself and I've heard people say it in the news, celbrity gossip mags, and from people I meet.  "If McCain wins," or, "If Palin actually gets into office," and whatever the comment it ends with, "I am leaving, leaving this country."  No one really means it.  Well, most of us don't really mean it.  If things go terribly wrong tomorrow and McCain wins, we'll see if there's a mass migration for the airport.  It'll be on Countdown, maybe even The O'Reilly Factor, "Reports are coming in saying that hundreds of airports around the country have been flooded with people trying to buy one-way tickets out of the country."  Of course, the commentary after that would be completely different.  Bill might be smiling and laughing, overjoyed at this shared loss of rationality across the nation while Keith might even start crying sitting behind his desk.  He won't even get to Worse Persons, he'll be so torn up.

Though a small part of me says, hell yeah I'd love to be able to just take off and forget all about it, there's a larger part of me that could never do that.  Oh, I'm not saying I couldn't live overseas.  I have, and I hope to again.  But to leave in the fashion that I've talked about above has a certain amount of finality to it.  It's like saying, so long America, and never turning back.  I couldn't do it.  There's too much of me that believes that there's something good here.  There's something worth fighting for here.  

The frightening part is that if McCain wins then we will have proven to the world and to ourselves that intelligence is not important.  We'll have irrevocably achieved a level of hyposcrisy no other country has.  The Right-Wings attack on intellectuality shows little regard for anyone that thinks.  Little regard for anyone that makes decisions based on their brain instead of their gut.  The only problem is that our guts are full of shit.

 So, if tomorrow's a bad day and Obama doesn't win, what should we do?  Rebuild, replan, and learn what mistakes were made this time and what we need to do better in the future.  I'll be upset, I might even cry in my beer.  I'll definitely be suspicious of voter fraud or suppression, but when it's all said and done I will go on.  I will continue talking to people about the future.  I'll continue fighting for intellectual passion and scientific thought to prevail over the failed attempts of religion to make decisions for our daily lives.  

I can't afford a ticket anywhere right now anyway.