Tonight is for dreaming

November 4, 2008

By Steve Klinger.

Random thoughts on the election of Barack Obama:

What a remarkable moment in the history of this nation and the world, extending across nations and oceans, races and generations — really, when you step back from it, a moment that strains credulity. How totally improbable, yet laden with hope, even in a landscape of adversity.

What would the Founding Fathers have thought, especially slave owners like Jefferson?

How strong the connection between Obama and King, especially when Obama invoked King’s final public words, assuring us that we as a people would get there – to the promised land. How moving beyond words could possibly be to see an aging Jesse Jackson, his face dissolved in tears of joy and pride.

The surprisingly gracious attempt at unity by John McCain, really his best moment in a nauseating campaign, a show of decency in a chorus of boos from his boorish supporters — and Obama’s promise to reach out in the same spirit.

The amazing turnabout in so many red states, the massive electoral support in heartland states, even if the Confederacy seems to live on in so much southern geography.

The relief, the inexpressible relief, that despite the dirty tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign, there was no October-November surprise, no “emergency” prompting a declaration of martial law, no massive election theft, no unspeakable act of violence (at least to this point).

After eight years of criminal rape and pillage of our nation by George Bush, Dick Cheney and their cast of scoundrels, we must now vigilantly scrutinize their last 77 days, but at least we can see the light. Can these men not just resign and put us all out of our misery, their own included? How about this: Can we impeach them now? I know it wouldn’t be a gesture of unity, but then there is the Constitution to defend, isn’t there?

And yet the change has not come to us yet, not at all, but only its harbinger in the form of metaphor. Still to be seen will be the extent of Obama’s courage and leadership skills in a monumentally difficult situation: two wars, an extraordinary financial crisis, a planetary emergency. And not least of all a deeply divided country, maybe not 50-50 as it has been for the last eight years, or maybe a hundred and forty-eight, but significantly enough that our president-elect is already an object of hatred for millions of Americans, whose ignorance and fears have been fed by the opponents of all sorts of progress, but especially consciousness. Is this cultural and cognitive divide really surmountable?

Obama is no ideologue, but (gird yourselves, progressives) that may be a blessing in disguise because his pragmatism may just enable him to build upon the coalition he forged to win this election, against astonishing odds.

It would be easy to make cynical observations and view tonight’s happenings through a prism of negativity and paranoia: If Obama could win he must be one of them, it must have been the plan; the powerful are still in control and just had to feed the masses a new opiate in the form of this celebrity-messiah-politician-rock star, who will proceed to advance our crumbling empire to the cliff’s edge and push us over, either in his own lust for power and greed, or at the mercy of his puppet-masters.

Tonight is not the time to unleash or even ponder those dark ramblings. Tonight is to celebrate the sliver of hope we have dished up for ourselves and sleep a little more easily to know we have avoided a McCain-Palin trainwreck. Tonight is to savor the unbelievable recapturing of hope among our young people – a national moment of opportunity resuscitated for the first time in 40 years, since bullets and blood obliterated a trio of Americans of promise and charisma comparable to Obama’s. Tonight is to dream of what might have been and perhaps can be again, for tonight at least we have banished the bogeyman and barred the door and can sleep and dream more safely in our beds.

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