Fundamentalism wins in the US
Shahjahan Ahmed Dhanmondi RA, Dhaka
The US Presidential election result was for most of the world disappointing, to say the least. A world leader with such arrogance can only spell disaster for a world looking for unity. Many strange things happened in this election. Majority of the Americans voted on an agenda that is fundamentalist to the core. Mr. Bush returned because the 100 million evangelists, who believe that only Christians can go to heaven, was his core constituency. An IQ survey of the Red Sates that went to Bush and the Blue States that Kerry won shows that States with higher IQ voted for Kerry. If the US had been a land of the educated; the cultured and the sophisticated, then Mr. Kerry would have gone to the White House with a thumping win. Unfortunately, the US is made of people who do not live in places we know the US to be synonymous with, cities of intellectual, cultural and religious freedom, but in places outside these where they see the sun rising in the east coast of America and setting on the west coast; where everything starts and ends in America and where the rest of the world can either accept this or go to hell. This is the American majority and these are the people who have voted for Mr. Bush.The Founding Fathers envisioned the US as a land of migrants, where the founding principles were based on equality in every conceivable way before the law. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, says the US constitution, are unalienable rights of every American. This famous core of the US constitution has been re-written with the Bush victory that now re-asserts these unalienable rights with a proviso; that to enjoy these rights one must be a "good" Christian; and most definitely not a Muslim; a Liberal or gay. The free world always believed that the liberal spirit, the core of liberalism, made a man modern, enlightened, sophisticated and a better human being. The Bush victory has rejected this and has given liberalism a tag that stinks. However, the whites will lose their majority in the US in 50 years, which in world history is not too long a time. May be Americans have to wait that long or may be this coalition will fail early or may be the liberal spirit of the US that has made it Great will rise sooner and extricate the country from this dangerous coalition.
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