Nov 29 2008
After the election
This is what I wrote in my paper journal. I’m putting it online in case of terror:I watched him talk last night after winning. I felt that I wasn’t accepting it all — his name, “Hussein” on the big CNN screen at the bar, my friends screaming. I voted for him, but I could tell that I hadn’t let myself care enough because I’ve become so cynical. The macro-conditions of my adult youth have been lorded over by an imbecile, a small man any of us could have out-debated as 12 year olds. The war, our dwindling social services, Katrina videos…marriage equals one man and one woman… ad nauseum. And now I can’t accept that things will change. “Give it time,” someone told me at the bar.I’ve been getting pangs of it in the past day. I saw some photos on NYT of black people crying in their church. I teared, but it was for them — their feelings came through the image and I empathized. I imagined what it must be like to care, to be a black person who lived through the 40s, 50s, 60s, and see this. I empathized. And I think about his story, about growing up with his mom like I did, and about how his family must beam at him, and I feel empathetic for his family. I feel like I know what it must be like for them. But, I haven’t felt it, any of the hope, the optimism, for myself. I don’t know how it feels to be myself and feel like my reality is going to change… that the country is going to be more like how I think it should be. That teachers will be paid well, that I’ll have health insurance if I quit my job, blah blah. I want to sink my teeth into a juicy steak hologram of our future, but I feel like “I should know better.” “Don’t get your hopes up.” “Wait and see.”
