Waiting to Exhale

I was driving along the other morning when I heard something on NPR about possible offshore drilling in Virginia. My first reaction was, oh no, not so close to home! I pictured wheezing, oil-coated ducks struggling to make it to shore in Assateague. Then the announcer said that President-Elect Obama was not necessarily against offshore drilling, as long as the drilling met certain conditions. And strangely enough, I felt a sense of relief.

I've been feeling that a lot lately. It feels like, thank God, I can finally relax now. The people coming into power will be pragmatic, nonideological, and like-minded. I can stop worrying for a bit because I know that there will be people leading our government who will make decisions for the right reasons. I won't have to argue with others, or with myself, because the gist of the market-driven, libertarian, corporate-first world view that characterized the current administration has been proven wrong. Or so I tell myself. It's nice to be wearing rose-colored glasses for a while. I know things are incredibly difficult and we face huge, huge challenges as a country. But I'm still feeling hopeful and relieved right now.

I call this feeling Waiting to Exhale, after a crossover chicklit book that Terry McMillan wrote in the 1990s. It's pretty good, if you like that sort of thing. It's about 4 young-ish African American women who are all looking for Mr. Right. Once they find him, they can finally exhale, release their stomach muscles, and relax. At the end of the book, some of them have met this goal and some of them haven't. For me, the point is being able to relax and feel okay where you are. And I'm feeling some measure of relief right now with regard to our political situation. Oh, I know I'll probably be disatisfied and worried at some point soon in the future. But, for now, please let me enjoy my honeymoon bliss.

So, why am I exhaling so gratefully rigbt now? There are several reasons:

The Black Thing:

I'm still amazed by the fact that we're going to have an African American president. Wow... It's been such a long time coming. The day after the election, I felt a probably misplaced sense of solidarity with every black person that I saw. That morning, the black woman who distributes the Post digest every day at the Metro station was singing and laughing out loud. Really. When I got to work I saw an African American director down the hall from me, and I grinned broadly at him before I remembered that we're all supposed to be non-partisan at the agency I work for. It was so emotional. Every time my mother called me for the couple of days after the election, she ended up crying. For me, the whole thing is summarized by a photo that Judith Warner blogged about recently. It's like, wow, we Americans have actually done something historically significant in the course of casting our votes. It's positive and it's important. We've moved forward and we're not going back.

I find myself noticing little things, like the use of Tiger Woods or Magic Johnson in ads for charities, or a particular ad on the back cover of the New Yorker that has a young white man and a fashionable young black woman obviously out on a date. I'm not sure what the ad was for, but it doesn't really matter. Either color isn't the main point, or else it's a positive background element. In any case, it's certainly not controversial. Wow. I think that's a small measure of progress.


The Face of America's Future

But the thing is, Obama isn't just black, to me he's really the face of America. He's black, he's white, he's an immigrant, he's mixed. He's lived in the east, in the west, in the middle. He's one of us and all of us.

Richard Rodriguez writes about the concept of "brown" as a metaphor for in-between states of being, and he argues that this is the future of America. He calls it "the color of our American identity." To me, this is a good thing. Immigrantion, mixing, the so-called melting pot -- these are what make American strong, vibrant, and interesting. It's not just about race, but religion and culture as well. Obama is brown in this sense of melding, mixing, energy, movement, creativity, youth, future.

The reason I didn't vote for Hillary, although I like a lot of things about her (including the pronoun "her), is that to me she symbolized the past, and Obama represented the future. And between John "the Google" McCain and Barack Obama, there was certainly no contest, in my view, in terms of who really stood for America and America's future. I feel like now we're on the right track, and there's all this positive energy for us to draw upon.


Revenge of the Nerds

I'm glad in a kind of ha-ha-gotcha kind of way that a bunch of brainy people will be in power in the U.S. This country is so anti-intellectual, and now we have a president who used to write poetry! Wow...so European...almost like Vaclav Havel. We'll now have a president who reads the newspapers and thinks things over. He uses big words with no shame and can even say "nuclear" correctly. Whew...my blood pressure just dropped by 10 points. Thank God...

Also, there's the greasy grind aspect. For much of my childhood, I was ridiculed for being a "brain". I felt so much pressure to play down my good grades and the fact that I could answer most of the questions that the teacher asked. I felt unattractive because of my so-called intelligence, and as a result I struggled to look just the right way and say just the right thing to prove that I wasn't "too smart." And now all of these brainy Ivy League grads are being appointed to high-up positions. And they're not the types to have gotten gentleman's Cs either. Mothers all over America are exhorting their kids to study hard like Barack Obama did, and kids are listening. Wow...you mean it's okay to be smart? You mean I can be a real American and still like to read a lot? So cool...


Public Image

It's pretty obvious that our image around the world has been in the toilet for the past 8 years. Study after study shows that even people from so-called friendly nations like the UK had an incredibly low opinion of the U.S. I know Americans who lied when they traveled abroad and said they were Australian or Canadian. I would never do that, but I understand the urge to do it. Who wouldn't cringe when faced with things like Guantanamo in the papers, day after day? I can't explain why so many people voted for Bush in 2004, other than to say that either they really agreed with his policies or they just didn't care to think about things too much. Neither of those two choices is very flattering to us as a country.

But now...but now...they like us, they really like us! We've made a good and even an admirable decision by electing Obama, and now things are on the upswing. I'm not sure what the polls say yet, but at least we can hold our heads up and feel like maybe we can lead again. And that doesn't mean leading by acting unilaterally, no siree.


I'm Right, I'm Right, I Know I'm Right

This is kind of obnoxious, I know, but I voted for Gore and I voted for Kerry (the lesser of two evils), and of course I voted for Obama. There was one teeny tiny moment during the Bush years, just after 9/11, when I thought that he seemed positively presidential. That was probably before his "with us or against us" remark. Other than that, he's been a grating presence to me for 8 long years. It was clear to me that his presidency was a snowballing disaster. So, it came as such a relief when it seemed that a whole lot of Americans felt the same way. Wow... See, I was right all along. And to actually hear a president talking about things like the hurting middle class and the need for workers to have realistic salaries...my blood pressure is going down again. Of course it could all be talk, but it's the right kind of talk.

So...I'm taking deep, relaxing breaths, for the moment at least. Sarah Palin may still be lurking in the wings, but let's hope she somehow gets discredited or her supporters wise up over the next few years. In the meantime, I think we're in the best place we can be, given how bad the economic news is. I'm generally not an optimist, so this feeling of satisfaction is even more meaningful to me. Let's hope this honeymoon feeling continues, even after we hit reality. Hopefully even remembering this honeymoon -- looking at the snapshots -- will help us to breathe deeply when things do get challenging in the future.