One More Small Voice

There is a communityof the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street andbeing the noise. Rumi

This is a dispatch from nowhere, really. Here there were no streets to dance on, no shoulders to rub against, and nothing but sky to look up to.

But we knew it was going to happen, and I wanted to be with others when it did. My friend Julie agreed to pick me up along the main road, and the picture above shows what I saw from where I stood: just a road sign, the moon, and a sky still streaked with lavender clouds.

I waited by the road in a prayerful state of mind, and everything seemed hushed and pending and momentous. We drove along winding roads to the west end of the Ranch, then upSan Augustine to the house of our friends. There we gathered in front of a small television set, its picture snowy and erratic, but the slightly outmoded technology somehow imparted a gritty sense of history. I pictured families intently tuned into their radio broadcasts during the Second World War, and I thought about the summer day in 1969 when a tiny television screen in a Long Island living room revealed a man stepping onto the moon. I remembered, too, that the friends with me now had been sitting with me in a local restaurant in March of2003 while a television above the bar showed Baghdad being bombed live over dinner and wine, and our leaders called that shock and awe.

So now we were watching votes coming in and states turning blue and the best manifestation of a living democracy, and this would be a night of celebration, marking an event so hopeful and affirmative that I still cannot settle down. I am giddy and tearful and grateful and proud.

It has been SO LONG, so very long.

The day before the election, I’d had a telephone conversation with a faraway friend, a person dear to me whom I have known for forty years. I told her that I had been making calls for Obama and I thought he was the right person to lead us in this time of change. I told her I believed our nation would have a renewed sense of itself if he won, a sense of hope and unity that has almost been beaten out of us. 

“I think you’ve really romanticized this,” she said. “He’s a smooth talker.”

I’m always a little baffled when someone can look at the same reality and draw such a totally different conclusion, particularly when it’s someone you thought you knew very well. It also occurred to me how often Obama’s eloquence and exemplary ability to communicate have been mentioned derisively, as though they were flaws. When did we become automatically suspicious of someone on the basis of a facility with words? When did the ability to inspire through speech become an undesirable quality for a leader to possess? Must truth be inarticulate?

But even more important, I decided at that moment that if indeed I have romanticized the Obama candidacy and what it could mean to our country and even the world then I am proud to join the ranks of romantics who share this beautiful perspective. Because you first need to imagine what could and should be, and imagine it in all its shining possibility, before you take the steps to make it real.

AndI have yet to hear anyone say it will be easy.

In the meantime, my head is full and my heart is teeming. Even my inbox suddenly contains poems by Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, links to songs of celebration, images of gatherings I wish I could have attended, words so moving I may just collect them all and share them here another time. Much has been written about the election already by people smarter and funnier and more insightful than me, but I feel compelled to add my voice. 

A few of the reasons for joy:

First, the election of Barack Obama helps resolve the shameful moral contradiction that was stitched into the very fabric of our Constitution. It is a contradiction that eventually tore us asunder and all through the years has strained our union, rendered hypocrisy a fundamental fact of American life, and impeded dreams and possibilities that might have changed the world. This election begins a real healing. All may sit at the welcome table. Hallelujah.

Yet the exquisite paradox here is that this election was not about the color of the candidate’s skin;President-Elect Obama did not run on race or anger or divisiveness. This election was about competence, judgment, temperament, and issues, and he always showed restraint, reason, and a positive, post-ideological kind of openness in which all were welcome to participate. He simply would not be lured into nastiness. He understood the real things that matter to the American people and he modeled a kind of dignity, calm, and clarity of thought that brings out the best in all of us.

Not the least of our reasons to celebrate, of course, is the fact that the American people have unequivocally repudiated eight debilitating years of the Bush-Cheney administration in the most meaningful way possible. And God, it feels good! (To be sure, Dubya and his cronies will leave quite a few turds in the punch bowl, and they still have 70-odd days to do more damage, but that particular nightmare is nearly over.)

The teacher in me wishes to reiterate, maybe because the words read like music. We have reaffirmed: democracy, community involvement, voter participation, idealism and eloquence over cynicism and name-calling, inclusiveness over anger, hope over fear.

We have begun to reclaim our good name, to be better versions of ourselves.

Yes, we heard the word sacrifice and we know it will take time to get out of the mess we are in. We can handle it. Americans are tired of condescension and lies. No need to hide the coffins and distort the news and expand imperial executive powers; we know what's going on and we're all beginning to hurt. We are willing to step up and do the real work that needs to be done. We want our young people...many of whom helped elect Obama…to face a future with hope.

 A yearning has been quenched. Can you feel the optimism, the will, the determination? 

I just read FDR’s 1941 State of the Union address and was struck by these words: Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change--in a perpetual peaceful revolution--a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions…

Two days ago we saw momentous evidence of that peaceful revolution in progress, and whether quietly or noisily, we will adjust ourselves to the changing conditions and work hard to shape those conditions in ways that will foster opportunity and quality of life for the citizens of our nation. (And our world, seeing as how we are inextricably linked, and seeing as how we will have a president who actually seems to possess a global sensibility -- imagine that?) Only the foolish and fearful can deny the sea change; the rest of us are going to roll up our sleeves and get started. We are officially transformed and we happily admit it.