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.

Risky Business

I grew up in an age of expansive optimism. It was the 1970s, and everyone expected to be better off than their parents. Everything was growing...I remember long afternoons running around the neighborhood, drinking kool-aid, chewing Big Buddy bubble gum, watching the Brady Bunch, and then having my mom cook me "sandwich steak" for dinner. We made pinatas and sugar cube pyramids in school to learn about other cultures. We all knew that America was the answer to the world's problems. It was the moral at the end of the story. And every generation would keep getting taller and living better. Sure, there might be an oil shock or two, but we knew we were the happy ending. We were the fade out at the end of the movie, the road that sleepy cowboys rode off into the sunset.

At the same time, I grew up haunted. I gravitated towards stories of war, in particular the stories of children who had survived -- or didn't survive -- World War II. I read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Mischling Second Degree, My Hiroshima, I am Rosemarie, The House of 60 Fathers, and of course The Diary of Anne Frank. When I was 12, I remember reading a story about a boy who survived a concentration camp, and how he wandered around lost after the war. I remember reading a book about an Armenian girl who somehow managed to survive the massacres. I played "refugee" with my Barbie dolls. Poor Hawaiian Barbie had to flee her home with only her long pink dress and high heels. I was also haunted by "Roots" and slavery (which I can blog about another time), but somehow it was the specter of war and total dislocation that really drew me in.

And I wonder why. It may have started when my 3rd-grade teacher assigned me to do a report on any event that had happened on September 1, and I chose September 1, 1939 (you know that was when Hitler invaded Poland, right?). That got me interested in World War II. But obviously it's also because I'm Jewish. It's not that any of my known relatives perished in the Holocaust, or that I even had much contact with Jews who weren't relatives when I was growing up. But I do remember my friend Miriam talking about Hitler when we were about 10, and having her say "You know, if he was alive today he would kill us." I remember sort of blocking out my response to that. Of course he wouldn't kill us, I thought, or at least he wouldn't succeed. Because we were American, with all of the security that the nationality entailed. So, I pushed those thoughts away. But the idea that life as we knew it could be totally upended overnight has remained with me to this day. The waters may seem calm, but beware the undertow, or the undertoad, as John Irving wrote. God forbid.

Because why should something be impossible just because it has never happened? I also grew up in the nuclear age, living near what could have been (God forbid again) ground zero. I remember that the first Wednesday of the month at 11:30 am, the county always tested the emergency siren. It was located near my nursery school and my elementary school. I recall one girl peed in her pants when the siren went off because the sound scared her so much. It always reminded me of a documentary I had seen as a child on the Battle of Britain, in which black and white footage showed Brits crowding into deep subway stations and fire engines trying to quell greedy flames as air raid sirens went off all around them.

It never occurred to me as a child to tell myself that it could never happen here, so I went and asked my mom which New York subway station we could go to if someone started bombing. She said the 34th Street station near Macy's was pretty deep. Never mind that we lived in the DC area -- New York was closer to my heart. That was in the days when I would ask my father about my worries, and he would jokingly say, "What if? What if? What if an airplane crashed into this building right now?" Something like that would never happen...until it did. After 9/11 one mother told me that her son said, "I feel like the fabric of space-time has been warped", and I could see what he meant. But part of me also felt like, why not? Why shouldn't it happen here? Once something happens, it's totally possible in retrospect.

So, how do you evaluate risk? This is a particularly timely question right now. I am imbued with the spirit of American optimism -- "If you build it, they will come." "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama." At the same time, sh*t happens, and as the Jews say, "Why does this sh*t keep happening to us?". I want to believe that the stock market will always go up, along with my income, but why should it? I want to believe that I will never be a bag lady. I want to believe that I will never be a refugee. I feel a sense of entitlement, but so have a hell of a lot of other people throughout history, and in the end it's just a word. Just ask my refugee friends from ex-Yugoslavia who lived good lives before the wars there, or pensioners in eastern Europe -- and hey, here as well -- who thought their lives and their plans were rock-solid.

I suppose there are no guarantees, even in so-called good times. And good times for me and for my nation are undoubtedly hellish for some other people around the world. I guess the thing to do is to press on, and try to gather enough information to make wise choices. I think about the Jews in Berlin who left as Hitler came to power, as well as my ancestors who fled the Russian Empire before the turn of the last century. Was their survival due to their intelligence, their connections, their dumb luck, or a combination of it all? Who knows... My religious Christian friend Tonya says what's meant to happen will happen, but that's a hard concept to struggle with. And in the end all you can do is keep moving forward in the face of these fears and try to take action based on some hope or spirit inside you. In the words of Barbara Kingsolver:

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, a loss of a limb or a job or a loved one...it's impossible to think at first how all this will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living...We hold tight to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.

So, blast the undertoad and all of these fears. Focus on moving through life thoughtfully and joyously. Prayer can help too, if that's what floats your boat. God willing and the creeks don't rise (another quote from Barbara Kingsolver), inshallah, and all that. Life is simply risky, whether you're American or anyone else. But, as they say, it's better than the alternative. If we can get beyond our fears, if we can act in spite of them rather than in reaction to them, then maybe it will be enough.