“I feel more excited today for election day than I did on my birthday.”

That’s the kind of sentiment that filled Messiah’s campus yesterday. Wow, what a day! And now people can’t stop talking about how relieved and/or angry they are about the results. I’m just relieved the country decided overwhelmingly in one direction. I dreaded another re-count. I just don’t think I could handle it. I would’ve had to run screaming around my apartment and maybe tossed a few pillows around for good, angry measure.

Of course, as my co-worker Dan just told me, two states have yet to declare their votes: Missouri and North Carolina. That’s 26 electoral votes yet to be accounted for. Not that it would swing the election either way. It just strikes me as funny that we can declare a winner without knowing all the numbers. Like, shouldn’t there be a due process to all of this?

Also, how did they do it back in the day? Did they have to wait until horses brought in all the votes to Philadelphia or Washington D.C. or something? And would people have tried to mug the vote-carrying horsemen to try and skew the vote?

These are the things I wish history taught us.

And while I’m wishing, I’m going to wish for less rhetoric and more substance for our country. So many people got emotional at Obama’s acceptance speech, or McCain’s concession speech. But you know, both those speeches just gave me a bad taste in my mouth. It’s all just talk, and it’s not even straight talk. We’ll find out what Obama’s made of in the next four years. My guess? That no matter who was elected, the new president won’t be any better than any president we’ve had over the last few decades, and he has at least a 30% chance of being worse.

And I’m going to wish that people would educate themselves about the local party candidates that were on their ballots as stringently as they educated themselves about the presidential candidates. Because it’s not just one man running the show.

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