Tuesday, that’s tomorrow, is the day the world will have been waiting anxiously for over the last several months. 

Since that is the day the citizens of the United States of America, arguably the most influential country in the world today, are going to the polls, to elect their 45th President and their 48th Vice President.

The contestants for President are Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party, who is the former Secretary of State and a lawyer, and Donald Trump of the Republican Party, a businessman with the powerful urge to make a fool of himself in front of everyone.

It will be the 58th quadrennial U.S. presidential election, and what an exciting exercise in mud-slugging political campaigning, this one has turned out to be!  

For the last ten months during those campaign rallies not a day was dully spent; all those charming secrets that have been closeted tightly for years, have now been was pulled out in the open for all to see.

Even old Trump’s penchant for being naughty with the girls from his beauty queen shows were laid out bare on the screen for the world to see, and as for Clinton’s infatuation with her now notorious emails, that too did not escape the reporters’ roving eyes.

In any case, as voting Americans everywhere are getting closer and closer to that fateful day, let them be reminded that their responsibility is to make sure that peace and freedom in this world we all call home, will remain and that it should never be taken forcefully away. 

Let them also be reminded that their country is the fulcrum on which the free world is pivoting freely today, which follows that they should cast their votes wisely so this freedom and this peace, we are talking about here are never tampered with and instead, they are perennially maintained.

On the other hand, if as some have said there is no more honesty in American politics today is the truth, does that mean honesty isnAmerican politics is dead?

We don’t know.

What we know is that if there is no more truth in American politics, then hope for all of us who are living in those vulnerable countries around the world, is also dead.

Still, it is while I’m tossing these troubling thoughts in my mind that come across an article titled “Why This Election Terries Me”, written by Frank Bruni of the New York Times.

Published on the Times’ website on 5 November 2016, it talked about the upcoming elections and what he thought of it. 

Bruni writes: “Election Day will redeem and settle nothing, not this time around. No matter who declares victory, tens of millions of Americans will be convinced — truly convinced — that the outcome isn’t legitimate because untoward forces intervened. 

“Whether balloons fall on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, there will be bolder divisions in America than there were at the start of it all and even less faith in the country’s most important institutions.

“The person taking office will do so not on a wave of hope but amid tides of disgust, against fierce currents of resistance. Tell me how she or he moves forward. 

“Tell me how America does.”

I don’t know how. And I don’t think anyone who is living in Samoa today knows how. 

And all of a sudden it strikes me that perhaps there’s something dead wrong with their general elections out there in America. 

Because I know that during our own general elections some six months ago, our politicians did not even campaign that hard, they just didn’t.

Neither did they do anything outrageously obnoxious such as parading up before the TV as they were accusing each other, of all sorts of crimes we did not even think normal people were capable of committing anyway.

And then the idea that in America, “the person taking office will do so not on a wave of hope but amid tides of disgust, against fierce currents of resistance,” as Frank Bruni has pointed out, is just vulgar, short and simple!

Here in this country if you really want to know, such a practice is so obscene the Police will just come around, take that person away and throw him in jail, without any questions asked.

Now imagine if “the person taking office” in the American way, as Bruni is talking about, is our Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi; not only would the Police be at the scene of this terrible crime in a jiff, but so would the entire district of bare-chested men armed with clubs, who are now ready for war. 

Perhaps old Frank Bruni should pay Samoa a visit sometime.

Now think about this little jewel.

Writes Bruni: “How could it not? Consider what we’ve learned about the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee; about the ability of plutocrats like Trump to cheat the I.R.S.; about the fraudulence of his supposed philanthropy; about the disparity between Clinton’s private and public words; about the unprincipled avarice of her husband’s post-presidential days; about the shady interactions between newsrooms and campaign offices? The America on display in this election isn’t a fair or ethical place.”

So here is the real America we hardly know about. 

And tomorrow they are going to the polls to elect their new president who will be in charge of the country for the next four years. And according to Bruni, not all is well in the United States of America. 

He writes: “And it seethes with hate. Trump has certainly shown us that. His incendiary words and unconscionable silences gave a green light to bad actors who existed before him but were never so encouraged: the anti-Semites who harassed Jewish journalists on Twitter; the white nationalists who threatened to intimidate minorities at the polls; the misogynists who hurled unprintable slurs at Clinton.”

And it goes on. 

There is no end to the wonderful freedom that is crazy America. So let their general elections end peacefully tomorrow, having elected Hillary Clinton as the first lady President of the United States of America.