October 2000 Rage Against the Machine Video

I thought that I would post this to show how many people, including myself, felt in 2000. I saw the election as a contest between two thoroughly mediocre candidates that didn't have enough substantial differences between them to make necessary changes to the direction of the country.

Man, was I wrong. I don't think many of us really grasped how important the 2000 election was at the time, as was noted in class a few weeks ago, but those seemingly small difference between Gore and Bush would have created a drastically different trajectory for America, the main turning point being September 11th. Of course it's all speculative, but I think Gore would have gone into Afghanistan but not Iraq, and he would have conducted relations with other nations in a very different fashion.

At the time, I cast my vote for Nader as a protest to the Democrats for abandoning the left wing of their party. I still don't feel horribly guilty about this, having voted in Massachusetts. And even at the time I thought it was wrong to vote Nader in a swing state, as I did recognize that Gore was the lesser of two evils.

This video documents some of the frustration people felt prior to the election, feeling that both candidates catered to the major corporations and they were too moderate to address major problems brewing in the globalization-era of the world. It's humorous, makes some valid points (as well as a few cheap shots) and it features many familiar faces that we've been discussing recently.