Final Gravity

Yesterday I walked into my old elementary school and cast my vote for John McCain. As I walked out I knew he wouldn’t win. I wasn’t depressed about it, I just knew it. Bush lost this election for any Republican the moment he decided to invade Iraq. The post-9/11 political capital was spent with reckless disregard and seen as a blank check. That check was cashed yesterday with the election of Barack Obama.

Unlike some of my conservative friends, I’m not really that depressed this morning. I have the hope that Obama will live up to his post-partisan rhetoric and govern from the center, now that he has reached his goal of the presidency. There are couple of lines in John Steinbeck’s, The Winter of Our Discontent that gives me some hope for this.

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind—but he must get there first.

This is my hope for the Obama administration. It’s the hope that he has acted as a left-wing shill because he had to in order to rise through the ranks of the Democratic party. Now that he has made it, he can let his actions meet his words.

This morning I actually had the occasion to smile upon this historic election and see it from a different vantage point. After dropping Andy off at his classroom I was on the way back to the car when I overheard the last bit of a quick conversation between the old African American school janitor and one of the African American moms. She was laughing as she said, “I didn’t get any sleep last night. I went to bed crying. I couldn’t sleep because I was crying.” He replied in his old southern drawl, “I never thought I’d see the day… never did.”

At this moment I knew what this election meant to some. It was a real stake in the American dream after feeling on the outside for so long. Many whites will dismiss racism today as a relic of the past, but it was only as recently as the 1970’s that schools in Texas were still racially segregated. That is not that long ago, and those wounds aren’t ancient history yet. This election meant something great for a great many people who have never felt like first-class citizens. This made me smile as I walked back to my car.

Now let’s hope that the next four years provide a reason to believe in the “change” that Obama has promised.