Archive for November 6th, 2008

victory

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

So after the screaming and the jumping up and down and the tears and the people dancing in the streets (literally), I’ve had a couple days to reflect.
I really do have to give McCain credit… after the sleeze and near race-riots he presided over, after the way he inflicted Bible Spice on all of us, I think he may have saved his reputation with one of the classiest and most heartfelt concession speeches I’ve ever seen.

Good for him. I’ve never hated McCain. I hated that he was so willing to sell his soul to the Rove wing of the party after what they said about him and his kids in 2000, though, and that he let the same extremist religious fanatics run his campaign now.

And then, well, there was Obama’s speech. I don’t think we’ve seen a man like Obama on the national political stage in at least a generation. I wonder if this is how my grandparents felt listening to JFK (since, after all, my mom is 51, she was a kid when JFK and MLK were killed, so it has been that long). I figure kids will study the speeches of Barack Obama along with those of FDR, Lincoln, and JFK for generations to come.

Yes, this is a triumph for African-Americans. No question about it. But that, in and of itself, makes it a triumph for us all. It shows we have moved past the nation we were, and although I don’t expect him to take the oath of office and have racism disappear overnight, this does send a message. So many people have bigotry in their hearts, and console themselves with the belief that everyone thinks as they do, and is too afraid to say. We’ve turned the light on them now, though. Today they have to look around and see that no, most people don’t believe as they do, most people don’t have deep seeded hates, and they are in fact a member of a rapidly shrinking group. Maybe some of their beliefs will be challenged, both by seeing our president-elect and his amazing family, and by seeing how few Americans believe as they do. After all, people can change.

And there is another triumph here, one of ideology. For my entire adult life I have been told that what I believe is outside the norm, that I’m on the left fringe, that this is a conservative nation, and liberal is a dirty word. I never believed it, though. Look at what happens when social security is in danger, look at how every single politician talks about their support for free public schools… two fine socialist institutions. Look at abortion- the GOP makes it a platform issue despite the vast majority, some say over seventy percent of adults, thinking that it should be legal at least to some degree beyond just rape, incest, and a mother’s life.
More than that, for my entire adult life I have been told I am in some way not a true American. That because I live in a city, work with a computer, don’t attend church, have gay friends, whatever, I’m somehow not authentic. Real Americans live in the country, or at least the suburbs. They’re blue collar. They’re christian. They drive pickup trucks, not coupes and subcompacts. God knows Palin said enough about it over the last few weeks.
And now we know, the “unamerican” parts of America are the majority. Most of us do work in offices, we’re cube dwellers on the whole, not plumbers, and even though most people say they’re christian, on the whole we as a nation don’t go to church, we aren’t bigots, and most people who might not be actively in favor of gay rights are generally pretty much live and let live about the whole thing.

And if anyone else makes a latte crack I seriously will beat them with a seventh grade US history textbook. Since that is the year us pre No Child Left Behind students learned that the US revolution was born in coffeehouses.