Thoughts on the Election, the Universe, and Everything

[evilhippo]

So, this is my boilerplate attempt at writing down my thoughts on the election. They're important mostly to me because I feel like, living and working around the people I do, I have to justify everything, and this is a way to get my thoughts in order for arguing with them, and also to rant a bit about what isn't clicking for me in their arguments. And writing is my way of sorting out what's going on around me...

How can you be unhappy when so many people who are normally unhappy, cynical and (yes) oppressed are singing in the streets? Isn't that what democracy is all about? This is just as important as proof and a reaffirmation of the political power of people working together as it is in purely racial terms. I... I know I've been upset at demonstrations of democracy's power to elect people I don't approve of in much the same way, but I don't understand how people can remain cynical when people are dancing in the streets and shouting from rooftops and overpasses. It seems so clear to me that we've broken through something that's been holding us back and stagnating things for a very long time. To look at an election that has made a significant portion of our population feel empowered and blame it on a powerful cult of personality and mindless following is just... that kind of cynicism makes me sad. It's fine with me if you fault us for picking the "less-qualified" man (honestly I think philosophy counts for an awful lot), and it's especially fine if you fault us on the issues. It's even fine if you want to maintain that nothing is going to change and we've all got our heads in the clouds. But it's not fine to sneer at people for being glad that they actually have proof now that their votes count. (As if 537 votes didn't prove that in 2000.) This was not just because of the arugula-munching whole-foods snobs. It wasn't just the black population. It wasn't just the college kids, or the intellectuals. It was a combination of all of us working together, and in that way, this election was undeniably different, and to cynically deny that that part of our hope wasn't fulfilled is just... wrongheaded and blind. Maybe they can't look the people in my neighborhood in the eye, for whatever reason, but I can and have, and we're all smiling.

It's also an important lesson that not all of us win all the time. My guys lost twice (well, okay, I wasn't too hot about Kerry. His campaign was so... inept). And while I often claimed that Bush wasn't my president, he didn't seem to want me anyway. He had his "mandate". Obama has reached out and, I believe, will try to bring people back in who aren't happy that he won. I have a hard time seeing that as insincere, since he could easily push them off to the side. He won by a very large margin. But he's still working, the same way he did in the primaries and in the election itself. He started with his base of people (mostly students and the overeducated "elite"), he even had to earn black support, he worked to get the middle class, he worked to get the poor. And now he's working to get the conservatives. He wants everyone on board. That's pretty unabashedly ambitious. And idealistic. I like that kind of stuff.

The best part of this election, though, is how many assumptions about people were proved utterly wrong (I love it when things like that break). The only notable right one, sadly, was that blacks in California would probably push Proposition 8 over the top. But at the same time, this also disproves the idea that we are all hard-line partisans. (How I WISH Obama and Biden had made a better case for not taking people's rights away while they were explaining civil unions. This is a war of words as much as it is ideals, and while I'd like to be able to call it marriage for everyone, the fact remains that there is a difference between marriage in churches and marriage as the state recognizes it, just because the churches and the state are separate things. But I see no reason why, if a church wants to allow same sex couples to marry (I'd say, probably, the Unitarians would do it). So saying that these people unequivocally cannot marry is also limiting the rights of institutions, the same sort (if not the specific one) you are trying to expand the rights of. Why does no one point that out? This, like abortion, is not the state's decision. Though abortion is far more personal and private an issue.) Outside of that, though, it turned out that women wouldn't blindly follow someone with a vagina, it turned out that the youth actually will come vote, it turned out that blue-collar Americans aren't all secretly racist, it turned out that even "real America" (hello, North Carolina) could turn blue, Republicans (nice work, Colin Powell, at reminding us that Muslims live here, too, and care just as much) can vote for the Democrat. And omg, we elected a thinker. This is what will have me dancing in the streets until January 20th, when it will become my duty to be a skeptic. The man has a philosophy that is not dictated by party platform. He considers decisions, he gathers experts, he takes his time and thinks.

And this philosophy isn't the us vs them that we kept hearing from our current leaders. In fact, personally, I think the most powerful part of Obama's victory speech was this line: "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn -- I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too." That is the line that gave me chills, because it wasn't nya nya I win now you have to deal with me, it was sincere, moreso than much of the rest of the speech (which was what it was. A well-written speech.) It was a concession within the victory speech. Especially in the context of the rally, it... I should set the stage better, because I didn't mention this when I talked about the rally, though in hindsight, it's really THE most important part. The crowd gave John McCain the same sort of hush they gave Obama when he spoke. Everyone shut up. Everyone! There was no leftover cheering, no jeering. We stood there and we listened to the other side (and, by the way, McCain's concession was fantastic and gosh he looked sincere. I wish that had been the McCain Obama ran against). The only boos were for Sarah Palin. There was applause when he was done (I gave him applause at several other points, which earned me a few stares, but hey, I'm technically a Independent (the Dems are largely wusses), so whatever.) This is the difference Obama has made already. These people, who you'd expect to be hard-line partisans, I mean these are the people who were standing crammed together in a park in Chicago, two blocks away from the man but there anyway. These people shut up and listened to the other side. Respectfully. This is something that I have not seen done by anyone in the time I've been paying attention to politics. I hope, among many things, that this stops this wrong-headed two-party system we have (which, by the way, the founding fathers were terrified of. And look where it's gotten us). Over the last eight years we've had an administration that thought all it needed for authority was half-plus-one, screw the rest of y'all. Which, while numerically true, is not the way to govern human beings. Because then you are alienating half minus one, and those people will tend to get upset with you in real ways. And here's the man we've elected, who's saying yes, I need everyone in on this, so I'm going to keep working for those of you whose trust I haven't earned yet, because I want and need that support. And really... I guess to further emphasize my point... I cannot think of this as a partisan victory. The Democrat machine was completely marginalized by Obama's campaign. It went outside and around it in the same kind of way I really wish John McCain had gone outside and around his own party's mechanism, rather than embracing it and allowing it to dictate his actions. (A lesson he should have remembered from the early primaries was that things went better when he hopped back into his bus with the reporters and was himself. The more closed-in and uptight he got thanks to the emphasis on Message the less he seemed like a human candidate. The more he seemed like an agitated grandpa that expects you to understand exactly what's making him angry. And to be honest, I think part of that agitated anger was directed, deep-down, at the Republican party. I know he didn't have much respect for the Bush Republicans; to have them calling the shots must have been deeply annoying, which makes me wonder why he made the decision to bring them on, other than wanting to take the proven way victory, rather than the path that had already failed him once.

I guess, all in all, it just nice to have my worldview actually line up with what I'm seeing. In the America I was raised to believe in, we love the underdog and we always root for them. We don't like the establishment. We don't step on other people's toes to get what we want. That's my small-town, dead steel city, entrepreneur parents view of America. It turns out that that America existed for other people, with many different origins. I know my mindset is a product of going through high school and college in the Bush years; liberal is a bad word, corporate America is where our power as a people resides, the guy you vote for isn't going to win the election, and fear is the great motivator of the people. I grew up in this, and so even though I wasn't one of the people who'd been fighting for someone like Obama to become president since the 60s, I was just as, if not more afraid that we wouldn't be able to pull it off. That wasn't how the America I'd grown up in worked. That wasn't part of the discourse. And there's a lot that all of us are still trying to sort out, now that we're on the other side of this barrier. We're still looking around, and it'll take a while to find out whether we've actually landed somewhere different. Until we figure that out, though, I'm savoring being able to feel honestly and unabashedly hopeful, and that alone is worth it. In the situation we're in right now, having two and a half months of feeling hopeful is a tremendous gift. And hopefully it'll be longer than two and a half months.

Victory for idealism! A victory I never thought I'd see.

In sorting this out, since the start of the primaries, I think the media is going to have a lot to answer for in the way it's handled this. Yes, Obama was their clear favorite, and he was given preference in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But, I refuse to chalk this up to the "liberal media" as the conservatives imagine it. My feeling is that the dissenting media didn't know how to handle this. It was a delicate topic and, to his credit, Obama was very difficult to argue with. I'm not saying this in a "he's right" sort of way, but in a "there were few missteps and it was hard to get footing" way. He defused problems well. He had a good story, he was doing well in the technical aspects of the campaign, while Hillary had a checkered past, an in-fighting campaign, and a charismatic but overbearing husband with his own checkered past. Later, McCain had a checkered past, an in-fighting campaign, and a dingbat of a running-mate who (amazingly) made more gaffes than Joe Biden. So long as he wasn't making mistakes, it was hard to run stories against him that didn't look cynical, and while cynicism doesn't stop people one-on-one, it does stop news agencies. Especially in this era when so many traditional news outlets are looking for an identity and a base. (Fox News and MSNBC are at the forefront of taking sides. Fox, I think, started as a counter to the perceived "liberal media" that came about in the last 8 years, under the mistaken assumption that anyone who wasn't reporting favorably on your side was rooting for the other, obviously forgetting how completely behind Bush the media was on the Iraq war. MSNBC started leaning left to counter Fox. I fear what'll happen if this becomes the reality of the media. We're backpedaling pretty quickly towards the sort of yellow journalism of the early 20th century. I haven't started to parse the fawning done over Obama post-election, but I'm considering most of it an attempt to sort out History and not a reaction to their favored candidate winning. I think maybe we've somehow forgotten that the media exists to follow a good story, no matter what side it's on. Opinion has swayed so far out of line with the president in the last few years, though, that it's looked more and more like the media has a leftist tilt, which has enforced it for the paranoid conservatives, who have spread it to more moderate conservatives. And no doubt this has also made some members of the media feel more justified in showing a leftist tilt, assuming others are already doing it. Personally, I believe the burden is with the person watching or reading the news. No one is unbaised, and we all know that, so it's our duty, if we want to be well-informed, to read as many sources as possible. But it's also a fact of human existence that many of us will read and watch things that reinforce what we think and make us feel better. I think it's the media's duty to find a balance, and to be responsible not in being unbiased, but in showing all possible sides. Attacking both sides in equal measure, or praising them in equal measure, is not the name of the game. Because there will not be equal amounts of attack or praise available, which leads to making things up, stretching useless stories, and other things that cause people to lose respect. Sometime in the next few years, there will be a watershed of these things, and hopefully we'll reach a resolution that doesn't divide us in two halves. Because if we have people who watch only conservative outlets and people who watch only liberal ones, we're never going to get past our problems.

Probably the oddest thing out of this whole election, for me on a immediate and personal level, is what it's doing to my neighborhood. There's the easy, observable stuff, like secret service vehicles zooming down Hyde Park Blvd. leaving the smell of burning rubber behind them, and the road block for two blocks around Obama's house. (This is especially weird because I think it was just last summer that a friend and I walked past his house and went "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if he was president someday?" This 'someday' seemed an awful lot farther off than January 20.) There's the fact that he's made me late to work every morning this week by taking his daughters to school (and I can be fake-bitter about this, but not real-bitter. Even if the ballot had said "You will be inconvenienced at every turn in your neighborhood if you vote for this man" I really wouldn't have blinked). There's also the fact that, since I see his motorcade every morning while I'm waiting the extra ten-to-fifteen minutes for my bus, he probably gets to sleep in later than I do. He deserves it but goshdarnit anyway.

Anyway, the part about all of this that's especially odd to me is the tourists. People flock to the neighborhood now. It used to be strange, seeing people walking through the quads at the UofC, snapping pictures and gawking at the students. Now I'm on the far north side of Hyde Park, beyond the ring of high student density, and people are snapping pictures and gawking at the neighbors. And the thought that these people think they're getting any understanding out of the way this neighborhood looks and feels is just... baffling to me. I hope they have some good tour guides. This is my fifth year in Hyde Park and I still don't get it. I love the neighborhood for its diversity, its beauty, and its quirks, but I don't get it. Maybe to someone who wasn't introduced to Hyde Park through the windows of an ivory tower would be struck more strongly by what about this neighborhood would "make" Obama, but I find that hard to believe. It's really something you need to experience to understand.

For one, Hyde Park, and Kenwood especially, is like Sesame Street to the real south side of Chicago, (honestly, if you're ever here walk past Kenwood Community Park when it's not winter and tell me it doesn't immediately make you think of Sesame Street. The only thing missing (and I intend to fix this someday) is the muppets). The real south side exists south of 60th street. The land south of 60th was systematically cut out of my Chicago experience by fear, because of all the dire warnings I was given, and the news I kept hearing. It wasn't long ago this year that a landlord was burned alive on 61st. A grad student was shot to death last year on 61st. It's rough, and 61st is still technically University territory. I suspect that is the area that Obama worked so hard in (in fact, I know it. Hyde Park itself has its problems, but there is a reason Obama chose to buy his house here, and that is that it's pretty safe. Outside of the University's pocket, however, it's a very, very different story.) Incidentally, Obama used to have his offices on 71st. I wonder if any of the tours will send people down there. Somehow I doubt it, because as mystified as they are by Obama, I don't think many people are going to trek boldly into the real, rough part of the south side of Chicago (and that speaks a lot for how much work needs to be done). They're here to eat at The Medici, to shop at 57th Street Books (I recommend both, by the way), and to stare over the road blocks. Some of them will poke around the UofC and gawk at the students. But maybe this is just the problem with tourism in general. You just look at the sights that seem important.

And for the record... I know a lot of people will be pointing to the UofC as someplace that "molded" Obama into who he is. The UofC... as far as its people are concerned, is a self-selecting sort of place. People don't go there and "become" UofC, they end up drawn there because they are the sort of people that fit there. I think that's probably something that people, looking in on the UofC, will overlook. The UofC is this odd little intellectual hermitage in the middle of an area that's already cut off from the rest of the city. We've got gorgeous, cozy buildings and lots and lots of nerds. But no real insight into Obama's intellectual molding. You might have to check Harvard for that. However, if you can find Bill Ayers around, or maybe Rashid Khalidi, or any number of the other radical professors that still live here, you might be on to something. And that something is that the intellectual community nestled in the neighborhood harbors a lot of interesting and diverse, sometimes left-leaning, sometimes right-leaning people. (Oh nooo, the terrorism. However, I must say, every time one of the "terrorist professors" stories broke, I was more and more proud to live in this neighborhood.) We have smart people with all different kinds of ideas, we have a university full of people who define their existence, at least in some way, by arguing their respective points, regardless of who they argue them with or whether one side wins or not, and we've got enough reality nearby that it keeps us grounded and makes us branch out (My disclaimer here is that this is especially untrue for undergrad students, who never leave the space between 53rd and 60th bounded by Lake Shore and, at a far stretch, Cottage Grove. This also explains why UofC undergrads are notoriously un-grounded, head in the clouds/sand/ivory tower nerds. This is why it's taken me so long to understand what we have here, because I haven't been a part of it in a broader sense until this year). But this community, in all its mixed-up glory... this is Hyde Park's strength. But to understand this, you need to get all of it, not just the highlights on the map.

This post will be subject to many edits, because I'm still thinking a lot, but this is a start.