Remember to Goat

In 2008 I had to vote by absentee ballot because I attended a violin making convention in Portland, Oregon on election day.  It was strange watching the returns on the west coast because the way things get reported from the eastern time zone everything happening on the other side of the country looks like an afterthought.  Sort of like the first time I tuned in to watch the ball drop on New Year's Eve from the central time zone and just got live pictures of people sweeping up Time's Square because I forgot the fun was over there by the time I finally reached midnight.

Anyway, looking back four years to the last presidential election, I have to say the most memorable moment for me was taking my kids around as part of a get out the vote effort for the Obama campaign.  Ian was away on Army drill the weekend before the election and I had promised some people that I would volunteer to go door to door in our neighborhood to remind people to vote.  We had flyers to leave at houses where no one was home, and when we did get real people at the door we were supposed to say, "Remember to vote!"

I thought it would be good for my kids to see that a democracy and our government is really just people.  People willing to go door to door for what they believe in, and people willing to vote.  Aden was six, Mona was four, and Quinn was a cold sleepy baby in stroller.

We had a fun time, the four of us, going from one house to the next and meeting people in our neighborhood and handing out flyers.  But it was cold, and it got dark early, and there were only so many times my kids could say, "Remember to vote!" before it started being less fun.  After getting through both sides of two really long streets we decided we had done our civic duty and it was time to go get some dinner.

But not before Mona hit a few more houses with her new and improved slogan, "Remember to goat!"

Foreign Policy in My Kitchen

I'm not a political blogger.  I have no desire to be a political blogger.  It's not that I'm not interested in political issues, I just worry that people are so polarized anymore that when you voice support for one side or another that people stop listening to you carefully.  I worry about stereotypes that cut both directions--that if you support different positions than I do that you will make assumptions about everything else I believe, and that people who agree with me will do the same.  No one I know is that simple.

So at the risk of alienating anyone or people jumping to all manner of conclusions I feel the need to comment on last night's presidential debate on foreign policy.  Not that there was any debate on foreign policy since it all seemed to be agreement on foreign policy, which I found rather mystifying, honestly, since I don't think the two major parties agree on much in that area.  But that aside, this is what I found myself reflecting on this morning.

There has been a lot of discussion about looking back at the past four years.  They have been a hard four years for many, and I understand.  But compared to the four years before that?  I prefer the path we are on now.

When I think of foreign policy, I think not only of the role of our nation in the world, but of the future of my children and our own family.  I think about standing in my kitchen watching President Bush on television while my husband was deployed in Iraq the first time.  I was washing dishes while my daughter, only four at the time, was drawing at the table.  I didn't usually express political opinions in front of Aden back then because she was too young to understand and her life was complicated enough with her dad away.  But then the president was asked if the responsibility for all those soldiers overseas troubled his sleep at night.  And President Bush replied that he slept just fine.

I almost dropped the dish I was holding.