Election Reflections 2008

November 6, 2008

On the streets of New York you could see two kinds of reactions Tuesday night: the drunk variety (wooooooooooooo! ) and the reflective, poignant, verge of tears variety. Personally I was too hammered to feel anything but a cathartic sense of joy and relief, but in the morning—as I nursed the best hangover of my life—I watched Barack Obama's victory speech again, and I felt a lump in my throat the size of Bristol Palin's unborn child.
 
After eight years of demagoguery, paranoia, wrath and carnage—which the textbooks will record as one of our darkest hours alongside McCarthyism, Vietnam and internment camps—the American people have elected a chief executive worthy of the office, a man who values the integrity of our constitution and the unparalleled greatness of its ideals.
 
Expectations for the Obama Administration are reaching messianic proportions, and he will surely make mistakes, perhaps indefensible ones. Power corrupts; Obama is about to become the most powerful man in the world. He could abuse his office; he could lose our favor in the months and years to come. However, if Obama fulfills the promise of his campaign—if he truly does restore America's laws and change them for the better—we might have elected a Jefferson-, Lincoln- or FDR-caliber leader in our lifetimes.
 
This is obviously a huge milestone for African-Americans, but it is also—to a lesser degree—a milestone for my generation. The attacks of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq have defined what should have been the best years of our lives. We learned to distrust our government, resent our fellow citizens and sneer at the words "freedom" and "patriotism, " which have been used as weapons against true freedom and true patriotism.
 
It is no small feat that Obama reminded millions of us why we loved this country in our childhoods; in many ways he embodies the speeches we memorized in elementary school, and inspires the same optimism we felt when pledging allegiance to our flag before class started. Young people showed up to the polls in record numbers (reporters are speculating the youth vote gave Obama the victory), not because we were scared of other countries, but because we were proud of our own.
 
It's good to remain skeptical of mass movements because they naturally discourage freethinking—and Obama's cult of personality has its fair share of creepy idolaters—but I no longer envy my parents for living through the 1960s. We now have our own "I was there" moment. We were part of something special, something extraordinary, something American.
 
We are no longer a nation which hates the world, and which the world hates in return. We are once again a nation which produced the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation and "I Have a Dream." We are once again the United States of America, indivisible with the possibility of liberty and justice for all. Let's hope it sticks this time.
 
In other words: Wooooooooooooooooooooooo!