"So We Make History Then" (Sept. 2008)

A leap year August means that two years of campaigning for the highest office in America is still two months away from the finish line. We are guaranteed another nine weeks of increasingly vitriolic ads, commentary and news headlines all aimed at making our blood boil and convincing us that one pair of candidates or the other are either the spawn of Satan or the most reckless spenders in the history of the planet. Pardon my personal lack of enthusiasm for that.

Let's be honest. Anyone nowadays who wants this job badly enough to go through all of this to get it, is not likely to be the most likeable person you've ever had a beer with. More likely to have an ego big enough to suck the oxygen out of an entire building. The very same forces of internetworking and instant communication that make my independent life in music possible, are the very things that virtually ensure that no completely sane, altruistic and well-meaning individual is going to want that job.

So while much is made of the history that we will make in this election, perhaps we can really make history in two ways. 1) We actually go and vote in numbers  proportional to the privilege of living in a free society where we can, and 2) instead of believing the soundbytes that the candidates, parties and money-hungry media constantly feed us, perhaps we can accept that both sides have some worthy ideas and serious flaws, and make our decisions based on how they might govern in 2012, not how much their campaigns remind us of 2004. Accept that they are imperfect human beings, and they stretch truths in both directions, and move past it.

Maybe we can truly make history by letting reason and not cynicism and fear guide our judgment. Whether you lean to the left or the right, it's hard to dispute that in 2000 we could not easily have envisioned the world we live in now; technological accomplishments, price of gas, how we live our daily lives with the backdrop of all we are involved in (and not) around the world. Many on both sides of that great ideological divide had ideas, dreams and nightmares, but truth is that the reality is stranger than fiction.

At the risk of being labelled a "flip-flopper", I quite frankly would be happy to know that whoever's in charge is capable of changing their mind in a rapidly changing world. Over the course of my life I've changed my mind a lot about a lot of things, and I'd like to interpret that as learning. I'm pretty happy that the earth isn't flat, and sad that Pluto isn't really a planet. We talk about corporations and businesses being dinosaurs because they couldn't adapt and went under. I vote for thinking; both candidates can do it, and run the risk of setting off a firestorm of flip-flopping frenzy if they dare to do it.

So perhaps as we go into this national referendum on who's done a more effective job of demonizing the other, we can do so thinking with clarity about 2012 as well as 2009. It's a big, hard, nasty, ugly job, and somebody's got to do it. Somebody will. But it sure would be nice if we made history in November for some different reasons.

Perhaps we will witness real history - the Tampa Bay Rays playing October baseball! If this comes to pass, I will look for cracks in the ceiling, and tune in to see how it plays out.

We are making our own history here. Madeleine took her first steps over the weekend. What a strange thing to contemplate, of all the billions of steps that we take over the course of a hopefully long and healthy life, that these were the first. I am sure that I will have long since lost count of her steps by 2012, but I will not forget those that happened here in September 2008.