In the fall of 2006, fiercely frustrated with the U.S., I left North Carolina for a year and a half to study in Sweden with students from around the world. The first month of classes we presented "My Country in 5 Minutes," a summary for our environment-minded classmates. I began my presentation with a hand-written transparency:
Dear Class,
I'm sorry my country is destroying the world.
P.S. I didn't vote for him.
My friends in Sweden may remember those first months what disgust I felt for my country, a country I knew to be beautiful and full of people I loved, but that had twice voted for travesty and seemed none the wiser for it. A country that refused to engage the world on environmental issues that I worried would soon come back to bite us. I could not bear to label myself Canadian while traveling abroad, but I frequently introduced myself as an American who hadn't voted for "him." Everyone know who "he" was.
Politically-conscious friends of mine joke that the Bush years revolutionized us - that we became activists when we might have become musicians, writers, scientists. I still remember that spring of 2003 thinking, my god, what is going on here? and trying to stop the war with such tiny, blunt tools - an anti-war march that barely roused the old hippies in town; conversations with the dark. What a sense of helplessness, of sliding-backwardness those years were.
That fall I discovered Daily Kos (I'm a long-time lurker) and felt the solace that at least there are others who see what is happening and are horrified as well. After the 2004 elections, I could not bear to return here for nearly a year. A professor of mine described the feeling that winter as a "dark cloud descending upon us," as we knew what depths our country could go in 4 more years.
I left for Sweden in 2006 in part because I was sure I would burn out and give up cynically on Americans if I stayed here - I had to get away. It was so peaceful to stop paying attention for a while (so much so that I barely noticed the 2006 elections). It was so frightfully peaceful to be able to think of our country as a country of idiots "across the sea" - away from me, as the other, as somewhere else.
And yet I found myself, over time, defending Americans to my international friends. Going to the trouble to explain the media monopoly that stifles alternative views on TV; the lack of science education in schools that prevents critical understanding of climate change news; the 2000 recount debacle; the suburbanization that keeps us stretched far apart from one another. Sympathy is a powerful emotion that creeps up slowly, and for me I was an American sympathizer before I knew what had hit me. It was a subtle transformation that let me return home last January with some optimism, and moreover, the nerve to try again.
I wrote my friends in Sweden, friends from over thirty countries in the world, a few days ago to tell them what had happened to my corner of America, to me, in the past months and days. I wanted to answer the cynicism a few of them had expressed about the possibility for any real change in the U.S. and to send Hooray Hugs to those I love:
I watched the returns anxiously with family and friends and when they announced that Barack Obama will be our next president, we were all a bit too shocked to celebrate at first. A part of me honestly thought that somehow Bush's party would figure out some way to cheat into winning the election for McCain or that it would turn out that racism in America would win again. Apparently sometime soon after the announcement the main street of my hometown of Chapel Hill was flooded spontaneously with revelers who had been watching the returns downtown.
It's finally starting to sink in that we won. It's strange even to consider myself a part of an American "we" at all and actually feel good about that. I spent some time over the summer and this fall registering voters and canvassing for Obama, and encountered happy progressive people and scary racist people and many uninformed and unengaged people - sometimes it was really depressing.
But in the last few days it has been like a ray of sunshine to finally feel like the majority in our country has come to their senses again, and the conversations I've had with friends and classmates about what relief we feel that the dark cloud of the last 8 years of Bush is lifting has made me feel like crying.
I understand the trepidation that Obama won't deliver the changes needed, that he's just another suit fronting corporate interests. I fear that may be true. But there's also a part of me that, well, hopes that this could be the beginning of more meaningful and lasting change in the U.S. It's good to see people paying attention and participating in democracy again. There are hints here and there (not least in Obama's campaign's incredible mass organization of people to get out the vote) that this could turn into a larger movement and that Obama would welcome that. There are communities growing that, I hope, will transition into forces to push Obama to enact progressive policies and hold him accountable.
But more than anything, I feel such a deep sense of relief that we will not be sliding backwards so fast as we did in the Bush years, that with Obama as president we at least have the possibility of moving forward (even if I fear it will not be fast enough for climate change, for ex.). I'm sure many of you with leaders of your countries who you despise can understand how hard it can be to be motivated to make changes at any scale when it feels like at the top everything is constantly being undermined. It's exhausting.
But now, for at least a few weeks, no one can rain on my parade.
Thank you all for returning our "we" to us. Yes we did.