It Matters

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"It is like honey to my heart. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have a role to play. My vote could possibly make a difference."

MOHAMED MUSTAFA SEIF, an accountant in Cairo, on voting for Egypt's first freely elected president.

The above from this morning’s NYT reminds. There was a time when it seemed to me that it made no difference who was our president, or whether he was elected by Democrats or Republicans. And I have voted on both sides over the past half-century and more. Plus, as long as one party is not in control of both the White House and both Houses of Congress, there should be reasonable check and balance against excess and fanaticism. 

My view changed after 9/11. Nobody knows how almost-President Al Gore would have reacted to 9/11, whether we would have been at war in Afghanistan for the past decade, or perhaps worked in other ways to face and try to overcome Muslim hatred of us. But it is for absolute certain that thousands more Americans -- and hundreds of thousands more Iraqis -- and others -- would be alive today, and our national debt would have been different, and resources could have been available for other things -- because there would have been no Iraq War. There are generations of American children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will never exist because of who was president. It makes a difference who’s our president, it makes an enormous difference. My disappointment has been that our Iraq War went on for so long after Tuesday, January 20, 2009, and that young Americans are still dying in Afghanistan, and will continue to die into 2014, not to even mention Afghan children. 

It very much matters who is president of Egypt, and Mohamed Mustafa Seif’s vote could possibly make a difference. It matters who’s the American president too. It’s a matter of life and death.

TW+