Gobama

What it was like:

Greg celebrated by having a Bush-burning party on Sunday night--everyone brought something Bush-related to burn, whether it be "the war in Iraq" or "my lack of civil rights." Some people brought an actual bush. There was an effigy of W that was burned. Not remembering the tale very well, I was thinking of the biblical burning bush as a story whose theme was "hope." I couldn't remember the plot, or why the bush burned or why it mattered, but I thought of it as a hopeful symbol. But now, upon revisiting it, I see that it is much more about endurance, and tests of faith. Moses seeing the face of Yahweh through the bush is certainly a miracle, but it comes with a burden--he has to lead the Israelites from slavery. No small task. And what's so miraculous about it is that although the bush burns, it is not consumed.

There are several metaphors here. We have endured (oh, have we endured) and it took an enormous amount of faith to bring us to where we are today. Faith in people, mostly--their power to listen, to gauge what is important, to let the best man win. We needed to be willing to risk the enormity of failure in order to celebrate the flight of victory, and we were, and for once it paid off. There's the fact that such a miracle does come with a burden--the burden to see it through, to actually deliver us from evil and not become it along the way, not to stagnate in the victory that has already been but to appreciate that each victory allows us to embark on a new quest.

But also, the bush is not consumed. And the Bush is not consumed. Like Voldemort, he can never be fully vanquished. Everything has not changed just because one thing has changed, but much can change as long as we do not forget that the past is easily a specter of the future and must not be ignored or taken lightly, just because its roads are already trodden.

I don't think Bush is all evil. I only realized this when his face appeared on the Jumbo-tron (such a strange word; I felt like I was in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and a "boo" nearly two million strong erupted from the frigid field. It bothered me, because it was the one moment of negativity in what was otherwise the greatest number I can conceptualize gathered in nothing but peace and commonality. We were there to celebrate what is to come, to be the best versions of ourselves and to commit to being so for the foreseeable future, not to throw stones. I did not expect to feel sorry for him, but I did--no matter what he has done, this was a formal moment of decorum and respect and we violated it. After eight years, he is probably hardened to the hate mail, he has become the artful dodger of shoes, and he remains an unapologetic wager of war. He has done such horrible damage, and yet I could not bring myself to hate him. I didn't boo, and while everyone (it seemed) around us did, Robin, Katie, Burke, and I stared at each other and wondered what we should do. I haven't asked them, but to me it felt like we, and two million others, had all ventured outside to see something amazing and rare and, though expected, still surprising--like an eclipse that had been promised but which no one truly believed would come, or even like people witnessing that eclipse before the knowledge of what that meant, everyone experiencing the truly unexplainable together. We were all gathered in quiet exuberance, patient anticipation, and with a hyper-awareness of the sanctity of the moment. And then, with that face and those boos, we were suddenly inside a Nazi rally, a Klan meeting, any such thing organized around a common hatred...oh yes, maybe this time we were on the "right" side of hate, but such thinking is never safe.

The night before, Katie's mother Nina had clucked at us that we were "dumb as grass" for wanting to venture out into that cold, those crowds, that complete craziness, and then, to show us the merits of staying home, she fed us a dinner worthy of kings. She and Burke have a slightly-hostile mostly-funny game that they play in which they never call each other by their real names, but only by things that rhyme with their real names: "Kirk, would you like some more peas?" "Oh, thank you, Lena, they're wonderful." It's when they get into names like "Lurk" and "Wina" that you start to wonder about their true feelings for each other. Nina spent about half the evening cooking and half the evening trying to convince us not to go, but in the morning she was up at 6am making us peanut butter sandwiches and individual baggies of carrots and counting our pairs of socks.

Nina turned out to be right that the "worst thing" would be the first thing: buying our metro tickets. We waited in a jostling cluster bottlenecking toward a single machine and a poor unfortunate metro worker whose job it was to operate it so things would go quickly. I was carrying my life on my back, turtle-like, because I had to fly out that night, and our first stop in the city was going to be to Burke's friend Tyler's place to set it down. Although that meant a crowded metro ride with an awkward protruberance emanating from my back, it really could have been much worse. Everyone was just so HAPPY! There were families, people by themselves, old people, people of all races, and everyone was excited, but a reverent kind of excited where you just didn't want to do anything to mess things up--you wanted to quietly revel for awhile, for this thing which had been such a long time coming.

Oh, such a long time coming. The long eight years of Bush, of course, but also the hundreds of years of oppression, the hours of aching feet in the backs of buses, the interminable minutes of November 4th, the lifetimes of yearning for freedom. Obama took his oath on the Lincoln Bible, the same Bible on which Lincoln was sworn in by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the man responsible for the Dred Scott Decision. In other words, the man who had determined that blacks could never be citizens administered the oath of office to the man who would one day write the Emancipation Proclamation (and the Gettysburg Address, which is SO beautiful; you should reread it if you haven't in awhile) on the Bible that would one day swear in the first black President. So much about Obama's run has been unnervingly poetic, from the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech to the death of his grandmother just before the election, to the various 100+ year-old people whose parents were slaves and who have witnessed so much since then, living to see this country of majorities make what still seems like the unlikeliest (but loveliest) of choices.

We got off the train and were unable to get out of the station because our cards had not been properly read going in, and when we explained the situation to one of the workers, he laughed like we had unmade his day and went to get the manager. She gave us the all-clear to get out through the handicapped gate, and while the worker held it open for us we thanked him profusely and I said "Yes We Can!" I felt a bit stupid, but he broke into a hearty grin and said, "Sure enough. Yes we CAN!" and wished us good day. Maybe we hadn't unmade his day after all.

The cold really was bitter, 15 degrees is what I heard later, although it felt colder than the 3 degrees that it was in New York when I had arrived there a few days before. After depositing my bags with Tyler, we braved the cold again, this time for the long haul, and tumbled toward the Mall. There were huge crowds on certain streets and little flocks of people here and there all gravitating toward the masses, and I imagine that if you looked at us from above we would look like the little bits of filings that swirl around a surface with the wave of a magnet, and we were magnetized, we were being governed by something larger than ourselves, and I imagine that, had we walked blindfolded through those shifting streets, we would still have eventually found our way to the same place, because at that moment, it was the center of two million universes.

We finally made it onto the mall just above the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and walked along the banks of the frozen reflecting pool, Lincoln behind and Washington ahead, past ducks floating in the one exposed patch of water, heads tucked backwards into their bodies, seemingly oblivious to any disturbance of their universe. The Washington Monument loomed before us, and although many of us were flocking toward it, we were walking through what was still recognizable as an open grassy space--but when we got to it, and crested its hill, and elbowed our way to where we could see anything at all, the masses were truly breathtaking. We could see the Capitol, albeit too far off to see the people on its steps, but we could see the carpet of people stretching from here to there, a swirling mass of bubbling life, all ready and waiting for the same moment. It was extraordinary.

It became clear that we were not going to be able to just find anyone we might look for. I had vague instructions of where Robin was, and we walked down the hill toward that side. As we tried to spot each other amid a sea of puffy, hatted figures, we each saw a person who was waving a flag with a glove fitted on top of the stick, and walked toward it (on the phone, I'll admit, not just at random), and finally saw each other from maybe 20 feet away--20 feet and much maneuvering, but Robin managed to make it to us, and we were in view of a Jumbo-tron, surrounded by believers, and by several of those we most love. For a moment, I wished it could last forever.

Then, I started my period. I think we got there around 10:30, and literally a minute or so after Robin made her way to us, I felt it. It was lucky Nina had stuffed some toilet paper in our pockets, and also lucky I was wearing tights, pants, and a series of long sweaters and scarves, because I was unable to do very much at all about this predicament for another 3 hours. I will say that, although my uterus' enthusiasm is admirable, I wish she could have contained herself a little longer, because she put me in a bit of a tight spot and did detract a bit from my potential enjoyment of the "moment," if by moment I am allowed to mean the next 3 hours.

The ceremony itself was lovely and everyone was quiet. If you can even imagine what 2 million people looks like, then try to imagine 2 million people all being quiet together. I don't think I could have imagined it. It was as though the air was a crystal figurine being gently handled by a kindly god--it could so easily have been shattered, by anything, but it wasn't. Although the invocation was inane, the oath was fumbled (pesky adverbs!), the "Air and Simple Gifts" turned out to be piped in, and everyone started to leave during the poem, the moment after "So help me God" saw a tidal wave of jubilation arise, I'm sure, not just from us but from the hundreds of millions watching everywhere--and I KNOW, with those gasps and those hugs and those dances of exaltation, that without even a place to stand, we had moved the world.

Afterwards, we found Greg and bade Robin farewell, and started the slow funneling back out into the streets. This took at least an hour, during which my blood flowed freer and cramps attempted to stop me in my tracks, but I made it through, repeating "mind over matter" until I found a CVS, Burke found us a cab, and we all found our way to Greg's favorite cafe, which serves fresh farmer's market fare and which was certainly open for nothing but celebration at this moment. The bloodbath could have been worse, and after some substantial cleanup I began to feel like myself again, my fingers thawed, and the coffee tasted more coffeeee, the brilliant light shone on all of us in our youth and happy exhaustion and beauty and hope, and I felt the aftermath of that moment Dylan Thomas describes, "the spellbound horses walking warm, out of the whinnying green stables, onto the fields of praise."

Let us begin.