As I waited for the results to start coming in this evening, I found it somehow appropriate to be reading, for a class, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I had just finished the part of the book when the main character, having survived an explosion in the paint plant where he’s working, wakes up in a “factory hospital” where some doctors are basically using him as a test subject and giving him electro shock. Superstition made me continue past page 270. Here’s a quote from page 271, which I bookmarked with my voter registration card:
- I turned aside and looked at the clutter of household objects which the two men continued to pile on the walk. And as the crowd pushed me I looked down to see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there; feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street. Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning.
In the above passage, the narrator is wandering the streets of Harlem in winter, and is witnessing an old black couple being evicted from their apartment. He himself has been “unillusioned.” I feel unillusioned myself. After eight years of lies, war, and utter mismanagement of the country on so many levels, how could all of us not be? Events tonight give me hope that I hardly dare believe in. But I’m proud… proud for the country, proud for President-elect Obama, proud to be living in a state that appears to have elected Obama by the largest margin in the country.
yeah but did you CRY? ; j
Coming from the South, I can’t believe what just happened. It’s like a dream. More than moving — a moment that might actually restore my faith in a country whose founding values I believe in but which has lately lost its way. Never would have thought such an election was possible, for maybe even another 100 years.
yes yes yes… I only wish it hadn’t taken the utter mismanagement of the last eight years to usher this in. I DO want to cry when i think of how hamstrung the next administration will be with all these problems to deal with.
one last thing re. the south: last night we were watching cspan after the acceptance speech. they were taking callers, and several wingnuts (some from the south, some the midwest) were already complaining that “obama can’t be president, he wasn’t even born here”… one woman had called the FBI to alert them!
then there was a call from a woman in san marcos, texas. her voice was full of joy as she described having gone to obama’s rally there and how happy she was with the result. tina and i were both proud (and nostalgic) for san marcos.
I’m sorry I missed that call. Of course, Hays County went for Obama.
My grandmother was raised in the segregated South. Her father, a French-speaking Cajun, was, by all accounts, a horrible racist. When they moved to New Orleans, they were the only white family in their neighborhood (they were poor, having just moved in from the bayou), and my great-grandfather took his frustration out on their neighbors by (according to my uncle) shouting “Out of the way, N—–!” every time a black man crossed his path.
My grandmother is still upset about Tiger Woods violating her golf-watching, and has, for as long as I’ve known her, expressed disdain toward minorities.
HOWEVER, she voted for Obama!
Either something has changed in this country, or George Bush has been bad enough to make many color-blind and capable of voting for a man with Hussein as a middle name….perhaps a little of both….amazing though. Staggering!
I did cry! And then I laughed. And today, I just can’t wipe grin off of my face even though I’m dead-tired. Life’s good.