I’m a bad American. I was out of the country on vacation on Election Day. At the time I scheduled it, I was trying to keep in mind all the November birthdays of the people in my life so as not to avoid them so I guess you could say I was being a good friend, and not a good citizen, first. However, I did eventually realize that my maneuvering meant I would be in the Bahamas when the United States was having one of its most important presidential elections of our time.
Damn. It.
Of course, I could always vote absentee, a process I was very familiar with after years of attending college in Boston while still registered in my hometown in Connecticut. Would I miss out on a celebration, though? Or perhaps, this was a good contingency plan--if all went badly, I could simply not come back. There are worse fates than to spend the rest of your days selling conch shells on the beaches of Nassau. It’s not as if I wasn’t paying attention to things on the contrary, this was the first national election that moved me enough to actually volunteer to get my candidate elected. I figured Obama wouldn’t mind me going on vacation—as long as my vote was still cast. And yet, there the guilt was, packed in my suitcase right next to my string bikini.
For my first time out of the country, the Bahamas was a good choice. Not too far away, native language is English, and no need to exchange currency. Scenery-wise, it actually reminded me a lot of Florida, that infamous swing state. How exciting to live in a state like that, I often thought, and would bemusedly lament my envy to those friends residing in the likes of Boca Raton and Colorado. “Your vote is so powerful, it means something!” I would tell them. They felt the pressure. When I brought my absentee ballot to the post office before leaving for my trip, I asked the guy at the counter if a lot of people had been coming in with them he replied in the affirmative. I surmised that to mean a lot of the area college kids (usuals to vote absentee) had been casting their ballots, and tending to lean a certain way, there was no doubt that Massachusetts was anything but a lock for blue.
Walking around the streets of the Bahamas, it soon became apparent that I was not in the U.S. of A. anymore, as nowhere in the States that I have ever been had as many friendly people as I encountered in Nassau. All smiling, eager, enthusiastic, on the whole, entirely pleasant to speak to! Bostonians would be shocked to find that cars consistently slow down for pedestrians to cross when they see you standing on the curb. As I searched among the shops and straw markets for souvenirs characteristic of the island, I chuckled when I came across the first set of “BAHAMA FOR OBAMA” t-shirts at one particular vendor. Now what would they have done if Clinton won the nod? No rhyming there, I thought. At the next stand I found them at, I casually asked the women working there what they thought of our election, which at that point, was the very next day.
“We don’t want any more Bush,” they resoundingly answered.
I fervently agreed, but pressed for more. Does the Bahamas really want Obama? If so, why?
“The Bahamas has not been an independent nation that long, and we remember the times in the US when the blacks were put behind the whites. McCain seems like he would put the rich ahead of the poor, and that’s not right. Just like I make decisions that affect my children, and my children’s children, when something happens with the US, it affects the Bahamas. We worry though with Obama too. If he opens up Cuba to the US, that would be bad for the Bahamas because when people come to the islands, they might want to go someplace different that they have never been to before.”
