It's been three days now since the election of 2008.
Since that night, I've struggled with a foggy exhaustion, a feeling almost like the disconnected underwater dream of hypothermia, as the hangover of more than a year of hoping and obsessing and fixating on this election is left behind. Hard to concentrate, hard to focus, sleepy. And still, the feeling sweeps over me now and then, the tears of relief and of hope, the genuine love I feel for this calm, determined, sober and adult man who has somehow managed to prevail in the politics of a nation which had devolved to meet none of these descriptives. The semi-participatory, semi-voyeuristic waves of compassion and profound joy communicated by the images of black Americans weeping in relief, in disbelief that at last this has happened, that the lie they have told their children for so many years has become much closer to truth: you can rise as high as your merit and your effort. It's possible, even for you.
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Meanwhile, the world goes on. The country is having a hard time catching up to the enormity of this event, too. The world is giddy with the meaning of it. Africa, of course, is over the moon, but to be fair, Europe and Asia and South America aren't far behind. After eight years of seeing the idealized Promised Land of America spattered in shit and blood and shame, this election provides some hope that there is a Good Place, still--that the principles of equality and meritocracy and liberty still live here somehow, despite how badly we've treated them in recent years.
For myself, this is a complicated cocktail, and it's hard to know where to start. Why I'm sitting here, I guess, to try to sift through it, make some sense of it all.
First, I guess, is the relief. After two consecutive cycles of stolen elections, all the dirty tricks, vote suppression and plain fraud on the part of the Republicans, I couldn't really be sure Obama would be allowed to win, despite my sense that it would be difficult to pull off fraud this year when Obama had so many different electoral road maps to the win and key states like Ohio were now under Democratic administrations. The GOP tried in many places, but Obama's people aggressively pushed back in the courts and they didn't get very far. Except, apparently, in Alaska, where something was clearly done to keep Stevens and Young in office. The numbers don't make any sense.
So, relief. I don't know that I would have found a McCain victory as crushing as the 2004 blow was, since so much hope and trust has dried up in me since that time. But seeing that the system could right itself is a big thing, especially when one more term for the party of rage, greed and ignorance would have tipped the Supreme Court and we would have seen the end of the Constitution for practical purposes.
And then, there's surprise. Not that he won, so much--he ran the most amazing campaign I've ever seen, probably the best electoral campaign run by anyone in Earth's history--but that someone like him could win. Someone grown up and calm, human, kind, gifted and yet completely unpretentious. Someone who refused to play the game of hysterical name-calling that the nation's politics have become, who took everything they could throw at him and remained unflappable, played his game plan, made the right strategic choice at each step. I'm surprised and delighted--and again, so relieved-- that after years of screeching zealot Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly on one side and screeching zealot lefties on the other (though rarely with as much access to broad-spectrum media), this man stood up and articulated the progressive vision of America as one people and its government having the purpose of serving that people, of providing health care as a right and regulation as a necessary safeguard and fighting to make certain that we and future generations have opportunities to live safe, happy, comfortable lives, despite the terrible challenges that face us. He said these things to us over and over again, he drew forth our history to remind us that all is not lost, he said it and said it until first the youngest and least cynical of us believed, and then the rest caught up: yes, we can. It's been said so many times that it sounds like a joke now, like a cynical slogan for selling Pepsi or something but it's not, it's the rekindling of a vision of the future that is something more than a slog into darkening, miserable days, it's a call to look first to our commonalities instead of our differences, to link arms in these cold and frightening days and go forward together, it's a challenge to accept the belt-tightening that will be required, to be willing to bear the dirty hands and sore backs that building this future will demand, and we rose as a people, most of us, black and brown and white and rich and poor, and now we can see in the face of this man, this good, decent, humble, capable man the truth, that despite it all we could elect him, we could see in his black face that yes, we can make something happen that has never happened before yes, we can write new history to heal old wrongs yes, we can rise to express what is best in us yes, we can yes we did yes...
And I think to myself about what it means to me, personally. I feel humbled by the Obama family--not just Barack, but Michelle, too. The thing that has struck me about them is how grown up they are, how sensible and unreactive in the face of the squalor of our nation's juvenile and prurient media.
Recently, I've had good reason at work to get really angry. And I'm good at that: I do outrage and diatribe really well. But I find myself thinking instead, What Would Barack Obama Do? And I see that my impulse to rush to defend my position is all wrong. What I ought to do is stay calm, state the truth as I see it, and just not worry about what the attacker has to say. If that approach could work for Obama on the national stage, when the corporate media hates the policies he stands for and there's a whole professional right wing noise machine ready to assail him no matter what he says, there's no doubt that it could work for me. If I could somehow hold off the fight-or-flight response long enough. If I could pretend to have the security that Obama clearly does.
I think about that gift a parent, or some close adult, can give a child, that core message you're great and I'm on your side. Seems such a simple thing, but without it I stagger crippled in the world, even today, and I look around me and see that many of those around me are doing the same, in their own way. To have that one simple thing would make me someone else completely. And I never will.
But I look at Obama, after more than 20 years of dealing in politics with so many tinpot egotists, Chamber of Commerce gladhanders and working-out-their-parental-issues cripples like Bush, and I see a man who had that golden present whispered in his ear by his mother, his grandmother, his grandfather. Who knew, from them, that even though he never really fit in anywhere he lived, he was loved and valued and worth something.
And that means he will never start a war to prove something to his Daddy. He will never use power for the sake of showing he has it. He can see that the people around him are like him, understand their common humanity-- as I can't, really--and know therefore that they deserve kindness and opportunity and help. He knows that they don't want to feel alone, and somehow, as someone who has less inherent belonging in this society than anyone else who has risen to his office, he has become an exponent of belonging. He makes himself a poster child for how America said it was supposed to be. Only here, he said, could my story have happened.
He has, at root, called America's bluff. It turned out we had the cards and we didn't really know it. We were better than we thought ourselves, dented and uglified, pampered and greedy and mean as we have become. Hey, remember that story? he said, the one about liberty and justice and opportunity for all? Remember that one?
Good story, wasn't it? he said. Say, let's all do that for awhile and see what happens. How about it?
I have never felt this before about a Presidential candidate, but I actually trust this man. When he calls on me--and he will, he's made it clear, he's going to call on all of us to do work to dig ourselves out of this hole--I will answer. Not just because I'll agree with where he wants to go, but because I want to be a part of it.
I would be ashamed not to be.