I tried, hard, to avoid writing about the US elections. I almost made it, but tonight I read this comment from Duncan and this one from Ben and I can’t hold it any longer, so here it is:

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

Duncan writes:

Instead, it seems that we’re just as good at intolerance as anywhere else in the world.

And Ben writes:

I have spent most of my life understanding the mindset of many sides in debates, but no longer can comprehend the mindset of the other side. They are beyond me. I do not wish to be associated with these people. I want out.

I know a lot of europeans that ask me how I can stand living in the US. The states I ever lived are Oregon, California and Massachusetts. Look at the vote distribution: that’s how I can stand it.

Every time I enter the US, I get my fingerprints scanned and my picture taken. That’s 6 times so far. I wonder what they do with all those pictures: they compare it or they use it to train their anti-terrorist bayesian filters? It’s called ‘homeland security‘, it’s supposed to work well to keep evil people out. I have no evidence of that working, but I do have evidence about working equivalently well to keep good people out too.

This is the land of the free, they say, the land that changed the visa regulations so that journalists from foreign countries cannot go thru the visa waiver program, but they have to go to a US consolate in their countries to obtain a ‘journalist’ visa. There are only a few others countries in the world that require a special visa for journalists: Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea. I guess that in watching an enemy you learn a few tricks too.

This is an administration that decides to spend its money on weapons rather than on their people. An administration that believes that the richer the rich, the richer everybody gets. An administration that believes a number is enough ‘social security‘ and the rest is up to you. An administration that believes in peace imposed by tanks, in security by everybody owning a gun.

But what really REALLY REALLY cannot understand is the concept of morals: it is immoral to give people of the same sex the right to visit their loved one in the hospital, but it is moral to kill thousands of innocents to bring them your “peace” in exchange for a little oil.

I believed in the people of this country. I did because I know a lot of US citizens and they are good people. They are ashamed for what their government is doing. They love their country, they love the values this country was based on, the founding fathers, those who wrote one of the most long-lasting constitutions in the whole world. I believed it was the Bush administration that was a bunch of abusive criminals, I believed in those bumper stickers that read “regime change begins at home”.

Boy, I was wrong.

The majority of the citizens of the United States of America approved Bush’s conduct and awarded him with an even stronger administration.

I hoped for these elections to say a collective “we are sorry, we made a mistake, we are correcting it now” to the world. that would have stopped terrorism more than anything fucking tank or fingerprint scanner. That would have shown humility and recognition, instead of the usual obnoxious cockyness, a sign that the nation is watching, that those actions were due to an evil administration and were not the will of the people.

Well, as it turns out, they were.

The majority of the people in this country believes in the cultural superiority of the USA, believes that ‘money, civilization, technology and progress’ are objective measures of the quality of life, believes in religious fundamentalism and they are ready to kill for that. They think that falsifying evidences about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade another country is a reasonable and morally correct conduct. A nation that justifies the mean with the end.

It makes me wanna puke.

I have many good friends that are US citizens, I truly love them and I love what they love about their country.

But it’s now time for them to face reality: this country is not better than any other and would be a better day for the people of this planet (out and in the US) when it stopped behaving as if it was.