“Sorry Everybody” Website

November 17th, 2004 | Published in Current Affairs

WARNING! It’s a political post!

I don’t normally do political, but this was interesting so I figured I would pass it on. An old friend forwarded me an email with the usual "you gotta see this site" tag line. Curiousity won out, and I looked. It’s the Sorry Everybody website and it’s pictures and letters from people apologizing for the results of the election. It’s not just U.S. citizens’ pictures, but also pictures from people from around the world accepting those apologies. There are currently 536 pages of photos! It’s pretty fun to just click around in there, see all the people, and read their messages.

In some small way, it’s starting the healing process between us and the world. A good part of the world doesn’t like the U.S. as much as they used to, and I don’t mean the terrorists. It’s easy enough for us to sit on our couches and cry, "I don’t care what Europe thinks!" but it’s not that simple. We don’t live on this planet alone, so when we tell the world to kiss our ass, they answer back. Just watch the decline of American corporations’ sales overbroad; enjoy your next romantic honeymoon in Paris…just make sure to say you’re from Canada. Anyway, since when did it become civilized is it to basically stick out our tongues and go "nah-nah-boo-boo, we don’t care!"?

When a country was as divided as it was this past election, you have to see the big picture…Bush won, but it wasn’t a landslide. A lot of people felt differently about the way the country was being run and the choices that were made. We can agree to disagree, my friends, but let’s be grown up about it. Let’s forgive each other and make some peace with this. And that’s how that website made me feel: connected to a bigger, greater world where people still care about other people. It was a good feeling.