Sean Neprud

That’s the greeting I got this morning at Starbucks this morning when I got my cup of coffee. It made me chuckle. It hasn’t much been on my mind, and I had forgotten that inauguration is tomorrow. I’m over it.

Then I thought about it, and further realized, I didn’t used to be over it.

Even moreso after that I realized, I have sure changed a lot in the last 8 years.

The Bush presidency has been a constant throughout my twenties. I was 21 when Bush entered office, I voted for Al Gore in 2000 shortly after moving to Berkeley in the summer of 2000, and now I am 29, and Bush is leaving. Thank God this crap is over. When I say “crap”, I mean my twenties, not Bush. Again, I’m over the whole Bush thing.

Man, I used to care a lot. I spent weekends at protests during the buildup to the Iraq war, and spent 4 days straight in the streets of San Francisco when the shock and awe began. In 2004, it took me a while to get behind any candidate, and when I finally realized that Howard Dean was the best choice and best chance for America, it was a little too late, he was just about to lose those first Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

I think it was when Howard Dean lost that I stopped caring about politics. Regardless of whether he was the best candidate in terms of his positions and policies, he was the most likely to defeat Bush. Most people that voted for John Kerry weren’t voting for John Kerry, they were voting against Bush. Kerry was a total dork though. He couldn’t pass the drink test.

So, the drink test: George Bush, despite how one-sided and special interest his policies are, would be a fun guy to go to the bar and get a beer with. It would be a really good time. The democrats didn’t realize that people pick their candidate based on emotion, then they use facts to back up their emotional decision. The fact that Bush won in the first place is evidence enough of this for me. I know I do this too, and I think everyone in that election did to some extent. When I looked at John Kerry, I thought, “that guy’s a tool”. I looked at Howard Dean and thought, “I’d like to hang out with that guy”. Seeing him speak in person back during the primary cemented that for me.

When Howard Dean lost the primary, I lost a lot of faith in politics. I still put a bit of effort into that election, I volunteered with Democracy For America, the group Howard Dean formed, and spent a weekend in Nevada canvassing people to vote for the democratic candidate. After that election, I was pretty much done though.

In the four years since then, I have changed fairly drastically. I am still very socially liberal, in that I think everyone should have the same rights as anyone else (me so crazy), and that I think we should take care of people that are, by design, left out of the system. I also believe that (holy crap) education is important, and (-gasp-) women should be able to decide for themselves what happens to, and in, their bodies. On the other hand, I have become really conservative in lots of ways. I hate taxes, I want less of them. I want less restriction on business. I support gun ownership and second amendment rights. I think deficit spending should be a special case, not the norm. I could go on about some of my crazy libertarian views on money, but I won’t.

Ultimately, being angry, having a lot of bumper stickers, and spending weekends holding signs at protests accomplishes very little. If something is gonna happen to change the world, it is gonna happen from within the system, not from without. If all these punks and hippies wanted to really do something useful, they would start successful businesses and gain some real power to make change. Smashing the window of a McDonalds is not gonna change the world. Starting a successful alternative to McDonalds will.

I have switched my focus from outside to inside. I don’t want to change the world, I want to change my world. I want to make myself successful, because that is honestly going to have the biggest impact on the world. It has been a pretty major shift for myself, and it has come in the wake of the last four years in which I realized that I can change who I am, how others perceive me, and what I can accomplish. In this light, the president has very little effect on my life. Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, it doesn’t much matter who is in there as I pursue my goals. Their work has very little effect on my work. The amount that they matter is drastically outweighed by the amount that they don’t matter. In that respect, I’m over it.

I know a lot of people are excited, and that’s great. I know a lot of people are fearful, and that’s fine. It seems that Barack Obama is either the Messiah or the Antichrist, depending on who you ask. To me, he is just a man with a job to do, and his job doesn’t have much overlap with my goals and pursuits. I want the world to be a better place, of course, and I hope he works to make it a better place, after all, he is in a much better postion to do so than I am.

Good for him, and good for me. I really don’t care much what Barack Obama is going to do over the next four years, I am much too focused on what I am going to do for it to matter too much.