can sympathize, I think. There are many worlds in this world, and all of them are equally real... and in many cases mutually exclusive/in tension with one another.

I grew up hearing my parents fight, not because they hated each other, but because for each of them the world was a very, very different place than it was for the other, and each of them had very different conceptions of what is "common sense, the way it obviously should be, just plain moral and decent."

They were both very caring, very judicious, very ethical people... yet their ethical compasses were in conflict quite often.

Happily, more and more the western world is full of people who have more than one culture under their belt. My parents had five kids. That's five more people who straddle "cultural boundaries." And we are all married across still other cultural boundaries. My own wife is mixed as well, but two completely separate backgrounds from mine. Our kids will straddle four cultures.

All of my 20-something and 30-something friends are also married across cultural lines. Not a single couple that is "pure white," "pure black," "pure Asian," or "pure latino."

This is why Obama is feeling generational... He is resonating with something that is a very real part of very many lives: the emergence of a true multiculturalism, and the sense of how unfair the cultural battles of the past and present can be for everyone involved.