Last month, there was a day that my workplace considered a holiday, but was not a holiday for Holly or for Daphne’s daycare. Holly suggested I take it as a “personal” day, a day in which I could do projects around the house that I’ve been putting off, maybe go to a movie, whatever.
I ended up taking Daphne to see a doctor about her scary rash (which turned out to be excema, no biggie).
Cut ahead to this month — I had scheduled Monday the 21st as a vacation day since Daphne’s daycare was going to close for the holiday. But they decided to keep it open that day after all, as a snow-day makeup. Aha — another chance at my personal day!
Guess what I did instead?
I took Daphne to the doctor to see if she had conjunctivitis. She did, and I ended up staying home the next day as well, with orders not to return her to daycare until she’d been on the medicine for 24 hours. (I ended up doing partial work duty by participating in a meeting by phone - they left a speakerphone on, and I kept a handset to my ear, with my thumb over the microphone except when I was talking, trying to keep the baby occupied and happy enough not to scream. Fun fact: Finding Nemo is darn near exactly as long as my weekly team leaders’ meeting.)
Anyway, moral of the story: don’t schedule a personal day, for the sake of your children’s health.
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So, I figure I’d better blog something here, since it’s been a whole month since I’ve written anything (although I have updated my links more often).
While flipping channels this morning, I saw about 30 seconds of an interview with John Edwards, in which he effused boyish glee at the wondrous Iraqi elections and pretended not to have any idea why some of his fellow Democrats were less than completely bowled over by how great and inspiring and super-fruity-ice-cream-dandy they were. The ballot boxes! The disregard of personal danger! The purple fingers!
Well, for anybody sharing that puzzlement, let me explain something. It is certain that many Americans see the Iraqi elections through the lens of local electoral politics, and that may well dampen some Democrats’ reactions — but, I’d argue, it colors Republicans’ reactions just as deeply, if not more so.
Two problems:
First, while the very fact of the elections can only be seen as good by fans of democracy, how good still depends largely on the circumstances of the election - how free were they? How constrained by continuing violence and fear? There are serious questions about fraud, intimidation, ballot stuffing, and whole areas being disenfranchised. I’m surprised that we haven’t heard more mainstream reporting on the allegations that Iraqi Christians weren’t allowed to vote in some areas.
But to be fair, this is mostly the unescapable effect of holding an election under war conditions. I don’t believe the election results are meaningless, like, say, the elections under Saddam.
More significant is my second point, namely, that no matter how pleased one is that elections took place, no matter how legitimate the election results are, it is still possible to be bummed out by the actual election results.
Via Hullaballoo (a lefty-type blog) I found a post on Riverbend, a blog written by a well-educated, English-speaking, secular Iraqi woman. Think about it for a minute and you’ll see how she has perhaps the most to lose when the elected Iraqi government comes to power. As she points out, the big winners in the election are people with close ties to Iran. You should read her post to get a better feel for this.
I’ve wondered all along how Iraqi elections could possibly be both meaningful and good for America. Under the pessimistic view (and I admit to being a pessimist about Iraq), there are two likely outcomes: either we thorougly meddle in the makeup of the Iraqi government, in which case our talk about democracy is so much posturing and our opponents’ rhetoric about America-as-imperialist-master is at least somewhat correct, or else we stand back and let Iraqis vote in a form of government that we probably won’t like.
What if they vote themselves a locked-down, virtual dictatorship? What if they vote themselves an Iran-style theocracy (they may already have done so)? Does that mean we won, or lost?
I’d like to think, which is to say I hope, that there’s some middle ground here, wherein a meaningful democracy can emerge and we can help steer it away from complete disaster. I’d feel a lot better about that possibility if the current leadership of the United States hadn’t proved itself so thoroughly incompetent, over and over and over again.
I guess I should go pick up a history book and read up on the Marshall plan. Was anti-American sentiment and guerilla warfare this prevalent at this stage of the game, in Germany or Japan? Why not?
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