Defending my country

I'm getting tired of the following conversation "You're American? Who are you voting for?".

In case you weren't sure, the world really is paying attention to everything the United States does.

I watched a half hour on an Australian morning show about Sarah Palin. Updates on the campaigns are almost as common here as they are in the US. Although there is definitely more media attention on Obama.

I'm also getting a bit tired of defending my country. Europeans, Australians, and Asians have all asked me, "WHAT is your country doing?!", "Why can't you guys get it together?", "How did you guys ever elect Bush? And then why did you do it again?!", "Aren't you glad to be out of the country now?", And the ever popular, "Who are you voting for?"

They all know Obama. Some people can't remember McCain's name, but the ALL know Obama. And if they had the chance they would ALL vote for Obama.

A guy from New Zealand who now lives in Australia and is employed by an environmental agency that frequently works alongside CVA, asked me, "Do you think Obama will last more than 6 months? I think there is just still too much racism in your country."

I've been asked about the electoral system, if people really go out and vote, and about campaign spending. And again, "How did you guys ever elect Bush?"

Remember the 911 conspiracy theories? I remember them being a topic of conversation 4 or 5 years ago. But out here people are still on that topic. Maybe it is the presence of an American that makes them want to talk about it. They want to know what I think about the theories. They want to know if I was in New York when it happened. And they want to know, "Why the hell did you guys ever elect Bush?"

They share their own country's election proceses with me. Did you know that there are 12 parties in Holland and that when you vote you get to vote for your #1 candidate, #2 candidate, #3 candidate, etc; putting all the possible options in order of preference. You never have a candidate that wins by a majority but I think there is something to be said for increased options. And people from England/The United Kingdom/Great Britian are all mixed up. Most of them don't even understand the differences between the 3 titles and what the reasons are that they use all these titles.

They watch all our TV shows, and movies and listen to our music. I watched the last half of "The Italian Job" dubbed into... Italian. Australia has Australian Idol, and I saw a commercial for a "new" show called, "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?" But they mock so many of our methods as "so American" -- peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, giant containers of anything, the size of our pool tables!

I was about to play pool at the Serpent one night when I noticed that the table and the balls were smaller than I was used to. I asked an english guy what the deal was and he said, "They are bigger in America because that's what you do in America. EVERYTHING is bigger." They also apparently call the game with the bigger and table and balls that we play "snooker" and the game with the smaller balls and table "pool".

Guilia, an Italian girl on my Cairns CVA team, told us that her family has kept the bottle from a 100 pill container of asprin from a trip to the US 9 years ago as a souvenir because they found it so hilarious that anyone needs to buy 100 asprin at one time. In fact she said, "If I want to kill myself, I go to America. They sell all drugs in big bottles."

They ask me if there are bitches near New York. Oh wait, they mean "beaches". The word always sounds like "bitches" when it comes from a native French or Italian speaker and always makes me laugh. But I can't explain the difference in the sounds to them and therefore they are all still out there asking for the nearest "bitch".

I've started to adopt some Australian into my language for the sake of clarity. Today I asked if we were going to meet in the "car park". I've started to tell people that it is a good idea to "hire a car" to go to Cape Trib. And I've succumed to calling cheddar cheese "tasty cheese". I won't use the phrases but I'm no longer thrown by "entrees" being something you eat before your main course, and the toaster being on the "bench" in the kitchen, or putting my "rubbish" in the "bin".

Put I've gotten off track here. The point WAS that as a Canadian woman who has been living in Australia for the last 20 years said to me, "The US really IS the leader of the free world. And all other countries do pay attention to what is going on over there; sometimes even more so than they pay attention to what is going on in the politics of their own countries."

That's scary. That's a lot of pressure.