Critical Failures

Even as a child, I never understood how George W. Bush won a second term. Perhaps the explanation was as simple as my likely reason for going against Gore, that John Kerry was so frightfully boring that Bush managed to come off as the more charismatic of the two.

Whatever the case, it became so hard to believe in this country. How could it come down to those two choices, how could we choose the same person who dragged us into such horrifying conflicts with no apparent end? Bush fumbled everything he touched, and his nonsense vocabulary was by this point familiar. If this man represented the country as a whole, it was scary to think what this country was.

But at the end of the day, this was a minor annoyance in my daily life. It didn’t affect me directly in any meaningful way, and Bush being president was a familiar experience. Surviving another four years would be easy enough.

And if nothing else, I never got the sense Bush was intentionally trying to sabotage our country – the lack of intent behind harm somehow seems honorable these days.