President George W Bush won his second term as the President. I feel very sick knowing this result, but somewhat predicted. Many American people do not know outside their country, or actually many of them don't know outside their states. So looking at the map which states Bush won against John Kerry, these are clearly inside the country. Kerry won on the east and wet coast states where more people have broader global mind sets.
I have written the same opinion in Chapter 1.5 and 2.2 of my web site, but here is to restate it. You have to spend a lot of time and a big effort to understand people new to you, particularly who have different religious/cultural background. Sometimes, it seems impossible to understand different people, but just accept them at first, then try to be understood yourself. From the modernized western culture standard (which Japan is also the part of), Islamic culture is difficult to understand, and especially the Islamic Fundamentalists are considered terrorists. If you immerse your mind enough to their side, to their value standard, the coalition force mainly led by the United States is invader. Prime minister Koizumi and Bush say the war was over, but in reality still it's going on, and lot of soldiers and civilians are killed frequently. Only the way to end the war is to talk each other and understand the difference each other and accept the difference each other and live on. Their would not be victory on either side, like Vietnam. This war is very different from WWII or the Gulf War, but very similar to the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980s.
It is probably the biggest difficulty to understand how my audience feels about my music, how they like it or not. I have my own story in my music. I believe that I could have shared the story with most of my orchestra players, but not sure if we, as an orchestra, could have shared with our audience. I decide my tempo, dynamics, expressions based on my story, mind, thinking, and soul. Did my audience have their background in their lives to have the mind, thinking and the soul to understand my music? I am not sure. But, this is the interesting part of doing music, and which would be the never ending challenge. The hope is that we would do the best to transmit our minds to the audience through playing music, and at least the audience is at least interested in our music whether or not they liked it in the end.