I voted today. I don’t like to wear my politics on my sleeve or on my shirt or on the bumper of my car. I was actually quite conflicted today. I’m particularly cynical when it comes to people in power and the tendency of people to demonize the other. That was an ongoing turn-off throughout the last few weeks of the campaign and all these so-called “approved” messages.

And I’m really turned off by fanatics of any sort – not that I don’t care for America, but to love this country is a strange feeling, with lots of mixed emotion. I was born here, but I’ve been told to “go back to where you came from” many times, and wounding words often made me feel that to be born in a place is somewhat incidental, that I am and can be something more than the place I was born. i have a stake in the land, but I do not have to be defined by it. Frankly, I do not fully understand how whoever becomes President today will change the way I should live. Not that I don’t think taxes should be allocated with greater oversight, aggressive financial tools regulated, or that war should continue, but I would like to question where is my treasure, what is the measure of my heart, and what are the things and people that I love? Am I just hoping that laws will be passed that I agree with? Or am I asking if the law is being written on my heart? It’s not that it’s not important to me…it’s that it’s too important to me. And I suppose I would want to pursue these things wherever I lived, but here I am and here I will be.

Simply put though, I do not raise nationalism as the banner over my head. Because while I am fond of America, I think for someone to demand me say that I love it is absurd, particularly on today as election day.

New York – A 22-year-old Asian American man reported to the police of Boulder City, CO. that a Caucasian man hit him in the face, insulted him verbally and forced him to say “I love America.” The China Press reports that the victim, whose name is withheld, was walking on the street with three friends around one a.m. Saturday morning, when a white man, with three others attacked him and held a knife at his neck. G.P. Peterson, Chancellor of University of Colorado, Boulder said the victim is a recent graduate from his university. This attack and another “terrorist attack” on a woman the same morning, Peterson said hurt the whole university community feeling. He said attacking women and people from an ethnic community should not happen anywhere, and it particularly puts students in danger.