Keith’s random thoughts

I woke up on 5 November to find that the world was subtly different. The change wasn’t unexpected: people had been predicting it for weeks, if not months. The United States of America has gone from being an inward looking, racist and isolationist state to one with a president elect who actually has experience of the world outside its borders, whose own father was African and who is not a W.A.S.P. This must be terribly shocking to Middle America, that central belt of religious bigots. But it offers the rest of the world a chance of real change with a man whose mixed race connects with the African American community, whose Kenyan ancestry will bring a new realism to the USA’s relations with Africa and whose relative youth engages with whole sectors of the population not usually interested in politics.

There was a real sense of excitement. I imagine that this was like the election of John F Kennedy. Can we look forward to a new age of vibrancy and cultural change? We can look forward to the end of the Bush/Cheney warmongering interventionism, the end of environmental recklessness borne on the back of End Times relgious fundamentalism and corporate greed. Yes, the world has changed and in the last months of George W Bush we are like the English people of the first years of the seventeenth century, just waiting for the impotent Elizabeth I to die so that the inevitable and real change could happen.