I'll be in San Francisco on Nov 4 -- far from the DC area I sort of call home -- so I was able to vote absentee today.
I went round and round, using the #2 pencil they provided, filling in the O for Obama. Round and round, round and round, ensuring it was absolutely, completely filled in.
And my heart swelled.
I'm old enough to remember watching, on a black & white television, the Kennedy assassination coverage, with my weeping parents. I was a teenage hippie wannabee, in junior high, with an Earth Day "e" patched on my pants in 1970. I have grown up watching my side lose almost all of the time, either in the primaries or the general election: the side of compassion, of caring, of community, of a government for-of-and-by the people.
I read "Steal This Book" and imagined myself a revolutionary; I browsed the early Whole Earth Catalog and imagined myself part of a quiet, human revolution. And I watched, appalled, as the Vietnam War was turned into a "betrayal" by the propoganda of the right.
As a 16-year-old in the mid-1970s, I tented with my family as tourists through the Soviet Union, and saw the fear on the Russian faces when they learned that evil Americans were looking for a tent site, because their propoganda had demonized us. I was amazed at the incredible inefficiency of the Soviet system (three separate lines at the grocery store: one to order, one to pick up, one to pay), not to mention the every-highway-mile pillboxes with people watching for our rented VW camper to drive by, noting our passage, and calling ahead to the next pillbox. I predicted the collapse from within of that monstrosity more than a decade prior to its dissolution. But I never believed that the Russians were evil -- just their political leaders.
I learned of the military-industrial complex much earlier, and watched it made manifest -- even doctrine -- during the Reagan years. I decried the military incursions into foreign lands, over and over.
I taped "No War" on my coat in the lead-up to the first Iraq war, and wept as I watched the airstrikes on Baghdad (my children still speak of that with awe and amazement, since they'd never seen me cry with such abandon); I marched with a white dove on my shoulder in the lead-up to the second Iraq "war."
I raised my children to speak, not hit; to care, not abuse; to think of their native intellect as a tool for good, not for advantage over the less smart.
I grieved as we wasted the opportunity to change the world by helping the former Soviet Union in its hour of need, and instead consorted with its Mafias. I'll never forgive Bush I for that utterly stupid blindness.
Over the last eight years, I've grieved and raged as I watched a stolen election, a president pissing on the Constitution, and another needless, senseless war be waged, this time with drones and predators and airstrikes of exquisite efficiency, and complete ineffectiveness.
Living in the DC area, I've had the evil spirits of the Republican ascendance in every breath, and have had the exquisite horror of watching from (almost) within, the systematic dismantling of oversight, rational regulation, and our own judicial system.
I've watched what I hold true -- that people matter, that human livelihoods have more value than the profit margin, that the vast majority of people are fundamentally good, that we must hold the natural world as holy, that the long term matters more than the short -- be spat on as "naively liberal."
But today I was able to vote for Obama. He's not the messiah; he's not The One; he's not perfect. But he's smart, and eloquent, and thoughtful. He's someone who mostly holds values I share. He could be, in Powell's word, "transformative."
There is so much that needs transforming. I know Obama's a pragmatist, and that he -- even with a filibuster-proof majority -- couldn't make the change I know we need, regarding climate change, environmental toxicity, acidifying oceans, depleted resources, and the rest, without a dramatic groundswell of support from the grass roots.
But in my lifetime, there's been nobody I've seen who has had more of a chance of sparking that groundswell.
And I got my chance to vote for him, today. With a better-than-even chance of not just his victory, but victory in race after race, state after state. It took the collapse of the "market system," and the military-industrial complex, to do it. But the American people seem to be waking up.
That he's black matters to me not a whit. That he has garnered 3.1 million donations matters a lot. That he has -- along with Dean, and so many others -- changed the dynamics of political power, also matters a lot.
That he can speak for the powerless, and speak to the powerful, in that same steady, direct voice, matters most of all.
I voted for Obama today. And right now, I'm weeping for joy.