On the Election

I have wanted to write about the presidential election all week but I have suffered a kind of post-political lethargy coupled with an overall sense of disbelief. I have followed this election and its associated issues for twenty-months, and I have longed for some significant political redirection since November, 2000. In the weeks after Obama's nomination I watched, stunned, the quick descent into ugliness that the country seemed to be experiencing. As Palin and McCain riled and stoked their audiences into a mad, racist frenzy, I could not believe Cheney and Bush were beginning to look reasonable by comparison. And in truth, I suspected it would all work and that McCain would squeeze past Obama and take the office.

Then there was Tuesday. I had never, even at my most optimistic, believed Obama would win the presidency so completely, so thoroughly, so handily that my faith in my country would be restored in just a few short hours on a mild autumn evening. Almost twenty years ago, my friend G gave me a framed picture of Martin Luther King with words from his most famous speech in the corner: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'." That was twenty-six years after the speech had been given and nearly as many before an African American overwhelmingly earned the presidency. I have been thinking of that picture all week, and of MLK in Memphis, and of Robert Kennedy on the long train ride home from L.A in the summer of 1968. Nothing in my lifetime ever seemed to live up to those men and the spirit of those times until now. Even with the great post-Iraq invasion and economic meltdown despair, I look forward to seeing the United States move down the path it chose this week.