Don't Forget to Vote Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is perhaps one of the most important elections many of us will have ever experienced. Please vote. I am not telling you for whom you should vote, but I am telling you that I am voting for Barack Obama.
In my very first post I discussed a certain mindset that reflects my food beliefs, but in no way is limited to food: being aware, informed and thoughtful. This way of being signals an intelligent, reflective individual who can rationally survey a situation, consider options and take time for consideration of the implications of certain actions before acting. Now is not the time for rash decisions or short-sighted plans. I believe that Barack Obama embodies the qualities that I praise when approaching food and life; he is thoughtful, well informed and completely aware.
I urge you to vote in this election, not merely because it is important for America over the next four years. The ramifications of such an election are much larger than our country and of our generation. I firmly discourage and protest American elitism, but there is no denying that what we do (wrong) in America impacts the rest of the world. Iraq, economic crisis, need I say more? We are a large country, with a large economy and a large military. We stand under a magnifying glass, and what we do can be felt across the globe. Not to sound melodramatic, but the outcome of tomorrow's election has the potential to change the world (not overnight, but with time, and for better or for worse).
Please vote.
To bring this home to my particular blog and to my own causes (obsessions), I leave you with a quote by Barack Obama in an interview with Time Magazine (I won't link to it, as the link keeps crashing my internet!) in which he comments on Michael Pollan's insightful, inspiring, humbling and informing letter to the next "Farmer in Chief", which was published in the Food Issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Those of you who read this blog because you share similar opinions will most likely have already read both Obama's commentary and Pollan's letter (or have read about it on other blogs). If this is all news to you: set aside some time to read Pollan's letter. And now, Obama's response to Pollan's message:

There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.