It's Election Day!!!

And my god; it's like New Year's Eve of some kind. It feels like another era is about to start. Something electric is in the air.

For the first time, everyone I know my age has been talking - heatedly! - about local politics. And the overwhelming consensus is that the MIWs have had it too easy, and that Sylvia Lim roxxxx. And James Gomez... praise be for the Persistently Non-Political Blog! I only hope the PAP doesn't clamp down on all of us freedom-speakers after this. Gay rights, maids' rights, the rights of the poor, the right to freedom of speech. But after all these years of having been told we're a politically apathetic generation, it turns out that if people are given a choice, people want to choose.

And I never saw it coming. Where did all our opposition parties get those candidates to contest the GRCs? It's like the ground is moving; the rules have all changed and the elders have no idea how to moor the ropes. We're blogging and podcasting and SMSing and just plain talking and turning up at rallies. We're communicating in a way I never thought I'd see in Singapore.

I know, I'm being silly. But that's the point of being young. That's the point of my writing: to posit the ideal before confronting the grit of reality. I explained to my mother, the PAP's always positioned itself as the fathers of the country. But we young people, suddenly we're given voting slips. And we're the rebellious ones. We want to shout back at our fathers.

It's not like I'm a clear-eyed idealist. I don't actually think the WP and SDA are proposing constructive enough alternatives to the issues they complain about, and good will and charisma don't solve all problems. The opposition's nowhere near good enough to form a government. I'm hoping and pit-falling-out-of-my-stomach fearing for a crazy victory on behalf of the opposition parties, shares and investments collapsing before we pick up the pieces and go back to what we were doing all along, because things don't change that fast. But really, it's been only 5 years since the last elections, and as I've said, everything has changed.

It feels magic, suddenly. The very idea, to think the words 'I live in a democracy'.

And by tomorrow... no, already today. What beast of an age is coming. To know that. What strange moment approaches, of victories on redrawn maps. What brave new world.

G'nite for now!