I have to admit first, I am a Japan expat and not down on the ground back home. But last night, about when all you folks at home were waking up after the election, I found a FWD: email in my inbox, from an old high school friend. Basically it said "Chicago has a bunch of poor negroes shooting at each other in it, and Obama didn't fix it, so America needs to WAKE UP and see the horrible mistake it made!"
Riiiight. I guess I figured that high school "my daddy is rich and HE says Clinton sucks!" conservatism was something that could be grown out of. But that reminded me of something important: we may have won the election, and Mama-san from my favorite cafe might have hugged me in congratulations, but that 46% of the country that went McCain last night is still there.
All those people screaming socialism, the crazy old "he's an Arab" lady, the glassy eyed "real Americans" hanging effigies on their lawns...they're all still there. The only thing that disappeared without a trace was that celebratory pizza I inhaled.
One of the things I loved about President (screw the "-elect," I've been calling him Pres for the last 2 months)Obama's campaign was the message of unity. Unity, that thing that was completely squandered by the Bush administration's shoddy handling of 9/11, the only short time in my 27 years of life that I have seen such a thing. But as we came together, tears of joy running down our cheeks, in Arizona Senator McCain was being booed just for trying to say something nice about the man he lost to. Bigots were saying, "well, at least we kept the homos from getting married" even as we watched a different, brighter history being made.
I've seen "news" people already trying to paint this as more affirmative action than a mandate, spitting on everything this campaign has achieved. They are already complaining that the economy has not gotten better and our troops are not home yet, despite the fact that (and to be fair, I think many of us do our best to block this out) George W Bush is still POTUS for 2 1/2 months. They'll probably be insisting this was the fault of a few dozen ACORN people voting 6 million times in swing states. Anything but admit that the majority of Americans want change.
I see a flashback to high school in the Clinton 90s, when I was sent to a "youth leaders conference" in DC. I remember we got to meet our representatives, and my senator Arlen Specter couldn't be bothered to make time for us. Instead, a few smirking young aides showed off a gigantic chart painted on the wall of the conference room, mural-style, of Hillary Clinton's universal health care plan. They mocked it, and the President and First Lady, openly to us (instead of, you know, explaining what a Senator does or trying to interest us in government or anything positive). A few young Republicans in my group joined in, but I will forever remember that as the moment that I came to hate the Republican Party.
I look back at that time, and I fear it will be a preview of what's in store for the Obama administration. The Right has been painting us as communists, socialists, godless muslim America-haters (still not sure how that works), smug intellectual elitists, for decades now. I keep watching these newscasts with people wringing their hands that the government will go LEFT now, but no one ever says WHY this would be a bad thing. We're just supposed to understand that the opposite direction of the government that single-handedly destroyed our country better than Bin Laden could ever manage, is a BAD thing. We may have won one election, but in a lot of ways, that was the easy part.
So that brings us to 2 problems to deal with:
- How do we bring unity to people who hate our guts, and refuse to admit that their reasons are all founded on lies and misinformation?
- How do we bring unity to OURSELVES, when we know that if our places were reversed, that olive branch in our hand would be a shotgun?
I gotta admit it to you guys, I'm angry. I've been angry since that day in Senator Specter's conference room and it's just snowballed in the last 8 years. I have 1 thing in common with the far-right: I also hate Nancy Pelosi, but that's because she didn't let us impeach Bush. I want to rub this election in their faces, pull the same MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT GET OUT rhetoric they did on us for so long, I want to demand everyone who voted for Bush in 2004 get down on their knees and beg the world forgiveness for their stupidity, I want to shoot Hannity and Bill-O and Rush and Coulter into space and sell Alaska to the Russians...
...but I know that it won't help anything, and just make things worse, and go against everything Obama has been trying to say. And it's so. damn. frustrating. When the very people that progressives are trying to HELP are ones calling us names, it's hard not to shoot right back and call them uneducated morons that don't know what's good for them, but those are the same words that help the "intellectual elitists" moniker stick, no?
We have 2 1/2 months before President Obama, Vice President Biden, and their awesome wives take over the country. What can we do in this time to try and make this smoother for them?