Yesterday was presidential election day here in Taiwan. And the Buddhist god of weather must have wanted people to get out and vote because it was a beautiful day and about 15 degrees warmer than it's been the past few weeks.
It was a very close race between the current president and the other candidate who is a woman. In the end the current president was re-elected. To be honest I don't know the difference between the two candidates. I would always ask....
"which one has a plan to deal with the lack of salary increase in taiwan in the past ten years? which one is addressing the problems with the education system, especially that kids have to go to school for twelve hours a day? which one talks about dealing with companies who force their workers to work fourteen hours a day seven days a week?" the answer of course is that neither of them were addressing these issues.
To be quite honest I'm at the point where I hope the china and taiwan issue can finally be solved for good, so that taiwan politics can finally focus on addressing the important issues in taiwan.
I don't know what it says about me, but most everybody i know voted for the current president. It's interesting that no woman I know voted for the female candidate. on the one hand i think that's great that gender didn't matter for them and they voted for the person who they most wanted. On the other hand I think it would have been great for the morale of women in taiwan if their was a female president.
I also know that many people said they most agreed with the third candidate but as with third candidates in america, there was no way he would win, so a vote for him was a vote thrown away. I often debate this with myself. Is it better to vote for the person who I think is the best choice or the person who has a realistic chance of voting.
Anyway, the reason the title is "make america look bad" is because unlike in america, you can't vote wherever you are. you have to go back to your hometown to vote. despite this over 80% of the people eligible to vote, actually voted. this means that people came back from living abroad just to vote. This desire to support their democracy actually makes me shameful that americans aren't nearly as motivated.
Finally getting to this picture. This is outside of a local supermarket and it was where the voting in my neighborhood was held. On voting day there were three small voting booths just out here. it's nice that they make the locations as easy as possible for people to vote. I was going to snap a picture when it was all set up but when i got my phone out four police officers were very adamant that no picture taking was allowed.
I guess i've finally arrived as a real photographer if the authorities don't want me to snap a picture of something.
