It is election time, not in Ukraine, but back in the United States where Nancy is registered as an “Independent.”
Her absentee ballot lay open on the table. The typed names on the crisp white pages are like actors on an obscure Hollywood script for a political drama.
Nancy slowly flattens the creases out of a used sheet of aluminum foil beside the ballot as she reads through the names.
Aluminum foil is hard to come by in Ukraine, and this piece, as soon as she finished, is as good as new.
“Which one of these presidential candidates would flatten out a piece of aluminum foil and reuse it?” she asks herself. There was only one, she thought. She fills in the circle beside the name of Ralph Nader and casts her vote.

More Images from Derry, Northern Ireland

I must be a Democrat. Surely I must be. If I dream of one day reading a book while lounging back in my seat as I travel from one United States city to the next in a high speed train, then I must be a Democrat. Or would I simply be a human hoping for the sanity of when I don’t hop in my car, which costs me hundreds of dollars to maintain and insure every year, weave my way into a four-lane highway of traffic and nervously shark my way into an hour-long search for a parking spot? Please help me to understand were I fit in the political spectrum of ideas. I need to pick a side. November is just next month.
I’m being told of certain hopeful politicians blowing rhetorical smoke of “subsidizing” rail infrastructure, and how we can’t afford such a scheme, in hopes of striking a nerve in fear of “big government” and higher taxes. Don’t we, the tax payer, pay for the roads that grow wider with every American Recovery and Reinvestment dollar spent? Don’t we pay for the ring roads that circulate traffic around cities causing suburb ring, after suburb ring, after suburb ring…?
Ohio is being offered 8 billion dollars to connect the three C’s, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, cities rotting from the core due to suburb growth. The politicians are divided down party lines as to whether or not the state should accept federal dollars for such an endeavor.
The third largest recipient of American Recovery and Reinvestment dollars in Ohio is American Electric Power (AEP), the single largest land owner in the state. They will receive over 300 million dollars to install pollution controls in their smokestacks (scrubbers). This is the equivalent of me getting a government grant to put a new exhaust pipe on my 1980 diesel Volkswagen. Ahh… ha! I’ll look into it.