The past few weeks have demonstrated an incredible outpouring of support to those victims of the Tsunami disaster. The results are impressive:

• 3 of 10 Americans have dug into their pockets to help.
• Blogs are everywhere on the subject, most of them focused on relief and personal experiences and all of them asking for money.
• Corporate behemoths donated $125 million in cash and in-kind help.
• The U.S. government itself has pledged $350 million to help.
• The U.N. has stated that over $2 billion in country aid has been promised.

Now is not the time to stop giving where it’s needed. But I believe it’s also the time to ask the hard questions as to why this disaster has trumped all disasters. In particular, it’s distressing that an entire continent far closer to Europe and the U.S. and wealthy Arab countries is being decimated by AIDS and virtually nothing is being done nor said. Here’s a list of stats about AIDS in Africa, lifted off of CNN.com:

• 5.4 million new AIDS infections in 1999, 4 million of them in Africa.
• 2.8 million dead of AIDS in 1999, 85 percent of them in Africa.
• 13.2 million children orphaned by AIDS, 12.1 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Reduced life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa from 59 years to 45 between 2005 and 2010, and in Zimbabwe from 61 to 33.
• More than 500,000 babies infected in 1999 by their mothers — most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The U.S. Census Bureau projects that AIDS deaths and the loss of future population from the deaths of women of child-bearing age means that by 2010, sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people than it would otherwise.

According to the BBC, AIDS kills 6,000 people each day in Africa. The sheer racism of this cash infusion to Asia is grotesque and needs to be called for what it is. This is not in any way to denigrate the true suffering of those families massacred by the hands of the tsunami. Nor is it in any way to knock the massive donations pushed from West to East. But it seems to me that it’s time that international organizations begin using their newfound spotlight to show donors — individual, corporate, and national — the more massive, more ongoing, and more outrageous disaster occurring on the African continent.

Somehow or another, the grade-C student, war dodger, and all-around good-ol-boy became TIME Person of the Year 2004.
It’s not astonishing. What is fascinating is that Time, in its infinite (pun not intended) wisdom, decided that George W. Bush was a historical marker of some sort — that he represents an American achievement on some order and therefore even greater recognition. Mr. Bush won a narrow majority, has “the lowest December [approval] rating for a re-elected President in Gallup’s history,” and has already gone back on his recent acceptance pledge to be a re-uniter.
The real question is who should have been picked. According to the posts on Metafilter, every U.S. President in office (except or Mr. Ford) has been covered since 1932. If not the President, who? Certainly, the Democrats fell flat on a race that was theirs to lose, religious figures are divisive, the array of media anchors are publicly seen as failures, business leaders have not led, the military is failing to win publicly accepted wars, and local governments receive no national attention. Internationally, the Europeans and the U.N. have not stood up to genocide while the Russians have failed themselves. In Asia, China has grown but the cost is unknown.
Who?

This will be the last political post for perhaps some time as I seek to re-transition myself and the blog to other, more pressing matters like design, the use of the color brown, the latest Palm handheld, and the dearth of good museums today.
Actually, I don’t mean to jest. Politics, for almost everyone I know, has taken center stage in their lives and the way they live, act, work, eat, and, probably, sleep. Some state it outright while others suffer quietly and with the conviction that others are enduring similar angst and dolor.
I think what I find most disquieting (pun intended) right now is the presence of tremendous — but unexpected — sadness among many I know and others I don’t. It’s as if no one expected Mr. Bush to win the election — or if he did, that his winning would be less triumphant somehow. This inexplicable (to me) feeling of collective sorrow is not like anything else I can remember during my lifetime.
I certainly don’t mean to act like some sensor of the collective masses — though I aspire to be a kind of psychic sponge that assesses the mood ring color of the totality of the populace. And, if anything, I’m projecting my something onto others’ nothing. Yet, I can’t help but think that the sorrow I’m seeing (on magazines, in friends, at gatherings) is the sense that an era has ended — an era of New Deal sentiment and policy that helped drive such sentiment into our communal core. It’s not about liberals or progressive or democrats or independents; it’s about gentleness, thoughtfulness, and justice and the expectation that those values were in the hearts and minds of other U.S. citizens.
It turns out that those expectations are dashed and our senses about the future of hope — are dashed.

First, thanks to M.B, for the title of this post.
It’s not without some incredible feelings of awe that the Democrats lost the election in large part because of people who believe that their particular kind of morality is key to the future of the country. The recent post by Victor (see end of posting) is important because it outlines what liberals and social democrats generally have been accused of for ages: government is built to help people make decisions about their utterly complex lives. In the case of this election, it seems that a slim majority of voters would like the government to be involved in a different set of relationships: not social welfare, poverty, old age, health and wellbeing, or education but rather marriage, sexuality, and science.
I want to change the corner slightly and point out some very interesting data points that have been published by the New York Times a few days ago. They speak to the reality of a very confused electorate, an empassioned and bitter set of folks that seem to think government is somehow both the problem and the solution, and a population filled with minorities that are not getting, somehow, represented in government. Here:

• 54% of voters over 60 (24% of total voters) voted for Bush
• 58% of white voters (77% of total voters) voted for Bush
• 88% of black voters (11% of total voters) voted for Kerry
• 74% of Jewish voters (3% of total voters) voted for Kerry
• 22% of voters felt that moral values were the issues that “mattered most” to them – these were the folks that won Mr. Bush II the election as 80% of them voted for him

P.S. The actual article (up for a few more days) is here but the superbly well-designed chart is hosted here.

Yesterday was so powerful, pulling a lever for a politician who could save us from ourselves and from the possibility of an overtly powerful chain of events and companies from controlling our destinies in a semi-authoritarian sense of statehood. But today these Ununited States are divided and Rove and friends would like nothing more than for 49% of the country to fall upon itself in disgust and accusations and recriminations. My only hope is that the Spring of 2005 will bring about a more full acknowledgement of the utter failure of Bush policies and, like Nixons’ second term, Bush’s will garner an internal reaction unlike any other seen this side of the Atlantic. G-d Bless America.

I’m no Dow Jones industrialist but you can’t beat the historical record. CNN reports today that a study predicts Kerry will win based on the Dow’s October record.
The first paragraph of hte story reads: According to a recent study by the Hirsch Organization, publishers of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, if the Dow loses more than 0.5 percent of its value in the month of October before Election Day, then an incumbent president is going to lose his job. The Dow fell 0.52 percent in October. This predictor has been true every election since 1904.
Vote tomorrow!

Although I’ve been relatively pessimistic about the current election and under the assumption that Mr. Bush will win by a narrow margin, I now have a hunch that Kerry and the Democratic National Committee knows more about this than anyone will let on: they will win.
It’s not based on facts, reporting, or punditry, but my hunch that Kerry will win this election is based upon the verbal mudslinging, the tone of each candidate, and the language behind some of their past week’s stumping. Bush is beginning to look weary, and his words about Kerry seem old, tired, and are symptomatic of fearfulness because they engender fear itself. Kerry, on the other hand, looks increasingly resolved, resolute, defiant, and alert.
What’s behind this? My suspicion is that the Democrats actually know that they are ahead by a few percentage points that is not reflected in polls; these points come from the typically disenfranchised voters, the mobile phone set, and the recently registered and angry. And I suspect, as well, that the Republicans right now realize they’re about to lose and are pulling out the punches like never before.
Neither party can actually talk about this publicly for fear of alienating voters and reducing turnout in a seriously close election. But I’ll bet both parties know which way the wind is shifting.
I could be wrong. I hope I’m not.

A newish (pun intended) organization called Operation Bubbe is attempting to bring folks from other parts of the country to Florida to help Jewish retirees get to the polls on November 2. (The overarching theme of course is that voters in Florida hold the key to our collective political future. Other organizations, like MoveOnPAC, have similarly good plans.)
O.B. asked me to design OperationBubbe.com Online Store | CafePress” href=”http://www.cafepress.com/opbubbe.13786616?zoom=yes#zoom”>a little t-shirt ensignia for them. I’m planning on buying a few of these.

I’m no conspiracist but I do indulge occasionally in reading highly educated pundits make sense of the world through suspcious facts that come together nicely.
I thought I’d take a stab at it myself, since it’s the kind of scary fun that we all love during this Halloween and Election Season and the fact is — with the current administration, anything truly is possible. Note these are only fictional hyper-thoughts about the short-term future of the world and are not gleaned from science, pseudo-science, news headlines or overly caffeinated beverages. Here goes:

• If Kerry is elected, the administration will allow a nuclear device or series of very large, indefinable explosions to go off in a small city in the United States. This will cause the Government to suspend the transfer of power and martial law will go into effect. Bush will stay in office for a long period of time while the country decides what to do.
• If Bush is elected, the Government will find that Iran has built up to ten nuclear warheads, all of which could be readied against Western allies. With a large number of troops already in and around Iraq, a memo will be publicly leaked that calls for plans to invade Iran in early 2005. A draft will soon become necessary and Congress will authorize it. Bush, though he stated there will be no draft, will have his politically dry hands tied and young men and women will be called upon to fight in the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East.
• After Bush is elected, the stock market will take a precipitous fall in February, sending the economy into a deep recession. The twin causes are the European, Asian, and Saudi pull-out of investments in the United States and the decline in profits being taken by American companies who no longer sense their privilege in world markets. It will make the crash of 2000 look like a cough. The new Bush administration will need to lay out a massive plan for saving the U.S. which will include reforming four-year presidential limits, collapsing domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, and expanding Federal work programs while deporting illegal foreigners to save American jobs.
• If Kerry is elected, a huge cyber-attack will be set off in early 2005, propagated by Texan Republicans through back-channel Russian computer systems. The attack, which could be either a trojan horse, virus, or something entirely new, would cripple U.S. government and business connections, supply chains, and communications and send the economy into a spiral. The Internet could no longer at all be relied upon, emails would be confiscated by the government, and online privacy will no longer be a right. Telephony and information technology generally will become artifacts of the past and the U.S.P.S. will need to govern (paper) communications. After four disastrous economic years, in 2008 Arnold Schwarzenegger will be elected to the highest office to tame the electronic wolves.

Walking my daughter to school every day takes about one half an hour up and back. During that time, I get to listen to the screeching of car brakes, the rumble of the subway underground, the scraping of truck tires along the road, and the pounding of fearful hearts at rush hour. I’m privy to listening to the roar and rumble of the commuting crowd, the sneak previews of music coming through someone’s iPod, and the generous “sharing” of typically crap music coming out of massive bass speakers lodged in tiny Honda Civics.
Then I’ll hear, above the din, my daughter say something like this: “Dad, do you sil exot stracked streekly cranst?” And then I’ll ask her to repeat it and then repeat it again until I’m two inches away and I’ll get it and answer her.
Mayor Bloomberg has recently made noise pollution an important facet of his means of cleaning up New York City, and I’m all for it. The car alarms, however, are barely the problem. It’s the shiftless sounds pouring off the street, off the buildings, and into people’s ears that is deafening.
I think about what it would be like to not hear anything and whether the perennial noise in my ears would be stoned by the silence.