Wednesday and Thursday after the election I was a little depressed, but perhaps that was more from the mild cold I had caught than from the election results. This week I'm more feeling the relief and serenity that I get from knowing that I voted for the losing candidate. No matter what Bush does, it's not my fault. I even tried to convince others to vote for Kerry. I did my best to support the political choice I thought best, so no matter how it turned out, I wasn't going to worry about it too much for too long.
How much confidence did I have that the world (or at least my world) would have been a better place after four years of Kerry instead of four more years of Bush? Not a lot. Being a numbers kind of guy, I estimate that my intuition assigned the probabilities of 52% to the world being a better place with President Kerry and 48% to the world being a better place with President Bush having a second term.
Why such a little difference? Given that a butterfly flapping its wings can completely change the weather patterns (the so-called butterfly effect), Bush as President versus Kerry as President will create wildly diverging futures for the entire Universe. However, my feeble brain is unable to predict and foresee all possible effects of the election results on the actions of six billion people in almost 200 nations with effectively infinitely complex interactions subject to the environment's unpredictable and continuing changes as the Earth continues about the sun. There are just so many unforeseen gazillionth order effects that make it impossible to have much of a clue regarding what the alternate "Kerry is President Universe" would have been like and how it would compare to the actual universe we inhabit.
I think Kerry would have been the better choice for me, but that choice is just one piece of a very, very complex puzzle.
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