Election Post

Like others, this was the first time that I had watched the election with such intensity and interest. It was also the first time I had seen my parents taking part in something that I honestly didn't think they would ever take part in. I got home a little bit after 8 in the evening from hanging out with a friend (that experience was also interesting because we talked about so many topics that we cover in class, but mostly race and it made me feel so fancy and educated), and my family had been watching it. They caught my up in the whole thing and I sat down with them. We spoke about the issues that were at hand, but just over the surface. My sister in law can be quite judgmental sometimes, so in order to not sound mean, she asked me to clear things up for my mother. It being my first time taking interest in the election, I had to look up some things in order to kind of understand what was happening, one of those things being the whole electoral vote per state thing, and their distribution. I didn't know how many votes went per state and how that number was determined. A quick Google search helped with that though, but only to a certain extent. By the time I was going to sleep, President Obama was already assumed to be re-elected, but Ohio still needed to be counted. My brother was watching Fox News ("Why?" was my question seeing as though that channel is so biased, but another post on that some other day), and they were making a fuss as to why he had been re-elected if one more state needed to put in their votes -- they thought Romney still had a chance. I was too sleepy to keep up so I went to bed. The day after, I found President Obama had been reelected. My mind was put into some kind of ease.

The next day my father had friends over, and they were drinking, and I was in the next room re-watching 30 Rock or playing Assassin's Creed 3 (I will be making a post about this later), or something. And at some point I had to pause to listen to my dad's discussion with his friends. My parents aren't very educated, especially my father, but somehow he had learned quite a bit about the politics of this country. My father doesn't know about my sexuality (long story), so when he struck on the topic of "the gays", my ears perked up. He was saying that there was no way Romney was going to win because he was denying gay people their rights, and because he said the whole "Marriage is between a man and a woman". And he said something that kind of made me smile. He said that gays have a lot of power (I guess more than given credit to), and that they played a big part in President Obama's reelection. He said this as if he was being accepting of gay culture, something I thought I was never going to hear. See? Humanity does have some sort of hope even in the older generations. My dad is kind of racist and not to mention homophobic, and yet, he voted for Obama (and praised him, really) and voice his (kind of) acceptance of gay people.

I am probably the most cynical person I know, which is why it surprises me that I have hope in people's positive views of feminism and the issues that it wants to abolish. It might take a while, but it's not impossible!