Hey Man, Can you Spare some Change?

Well, another election, another election that I am not living in America. Coincidence, or not? Not sure myself on that one.

During the 2004 elections I was living in Castiglione Fiorentino, a quaint hill-top hamlet in Tuscany, teaching for a Study Abroad consortium of Italart under the auspices of The University of Texas at Austin.

I am neither Democrat, nor Republican, but choose to choose upon the issues. Some candidates from either party are always the better choice from one’s own party line. And, there are those who are on the fringe who also have something to say.

Recently, I was made an “honorary” member of a highly prestigious English university’s water polo team due to a very random turn of events, which I will digress to at another time. However, something came out of that chance encounter that I have wanted to address for some time now.

During the course of the evening following the water polo tournament in which I was made such a figure for this team, I was showing them around Antwerp and providing them with a balanced tour of fun and information about a town I truly love. However, at one point, things took a rather odd and somewhat sinister turn.

When we were at one of my favo(u)rite cafes in town, De Muze, for some reason the conversation switched to politics, and took on an accelerated anti-American stance which bore its hydra-like head from a comment I had made about Plato’s Republic that the danger of a democracy can be a tyranny, and that his solution, much to the acclaim of those monarchists amongst us, was that it was an enlightened Monarch, or solitary ruler.

Well, if history is to serve us well, perhaps the one and only enlightened “Monarch” was Marcus Aurelius, a man who struggled with his designation above all others and who spent his “free” time steeped in philosophical pursuits in line of Epictetus and others about the real Stoic nature of the way things are.

However, what happened, and I will not rehearse the entire events as not to make certain characters the protagonist and others the antagonist, it came down to my country, the USA being excoriated by a group of highly educated, yet naïve British youths and a few overly opinionated Belgians joining in the fray to tell me how bad my country was and that it had in fact already morphed into a tyranny from a democracy because of our two-party system that was “one.”

If you have caught your breath now, which it took me longer to do than four games of water polo after over four years hiatus from the sport, I tried to rejoinder, only to be “boo-ed” down by the Brits and passively-aggressively snubbed by the Belgians. The kicker was that NONE of these people had ever been to the USA, thus it was all theoretical, and I have been and lived in everyone to theirs...

My country a Tyranny? Wow, I think not. Which brings me back to the origin of this thought. When I was in Italy and Bush II “won” the election, the atmosphere was demoralizing at best. We found out that all ex-pat votes for that election did not make it to the polls, a margin that would have easily tipped the scales.

The morning after, on the intelligentsia newspaper, La Repubblica, it was black, with the caption that more or less said, “Darkness falls upon America.” That was echoed across the European continent. Whereas the days before when I went to get a coffee in the morning at the local café, and was greeted warmly, suddenly, because I was American, everything changed. I felt it. The students felt it. My ex, who is Belgian, did not, and said I was exaggerating. Well, it was visceral. Being American, post Cold War, is not the exciting, engaging experience it was for several decades. Now, one needs to be aware, for if not, things can turn on a dime, as they did with my cadre of water polo mates from across the Channel.

When Obama was elected I was living in Antwerp again already. I remember the moment, as some remember Kennedy being shot, the Space Shuttle exploding, or whatnot, but I remember it well. I was driving my mother-in-law’s car at the time and heard the speech from Chicago. The radio announcer from Studio Brussel began to cry. I began to cry. Not because Obama was “my man” but because I realized that Change came come to America, and it does. Maybe not in Washington, but it is still a country that shows us we can be who we want to be.

Europe, in general, is toe the line. Status Quo. I see it every day and am amazed about how, as an American, I think about other solutions to problems, but, Europe remains the Old World. America the “New World” and India, a place that changed my life in many ways is the “Real World.”

I get caught up in the mundane. I have to. You have to, dear reader, that is a fact.

However, is the mundane the “real”?  I think not. America is  not a tyranny, Europe is not better off, and “Asia” (a very dubious title) is not a new emergent threat. Guess what? It’s been there for a very long time. Wake up people. Change is what you make of it…