11/04/2008
I haven't yet gone obsessively in search of commentary and analysis, as I have been wont to do over the past, oh, 10 months. I want to set down my own thoughts before I read anyone else's, so that I can look back later on and know that this is what I was thinking, not something I absorbed from someone else.
Originally, I was planning to write a somewhat pompous entry about the huge step forward our country has taken tonight, but it struck me that I really cannot grasp the momentousness of this occasion. It's not that I don't understand what it is, and it's not that I'm not terribly happy, because I am. It's more that I don't have the correct frame of reference.
When our parents were growing up, society was still segregated. A man like Barack Obama would not have been able to attend the same schools, or even to drink from the same water fountains. Racism is still evident in our society today, but most of us take it for granted that we can all go to the same places and do the same things. Intellectually, I've always known that, yeah, Obama is half-African-American, but I've never really thought of him as a racial figure, even when race was injected into the campaign. To me, he's always just been Barack Obama, a brilliant, even-tempered leader with a gorgeous smile (yes, I have a crush). Heck, he's not even the first Barack I've known (though the others have spelled their names differently), so I don't even think of his name as unusual.
Maybe that, in and of itself, is some kind of measure of how far society may have come: that someone can say to me, "We just elected Barack Obama president," and my instinctive response is, "Well, yeah, of course we did. Why wouldn't we?"
Originally, I was planning to write a somewhat pompous entry about the huge step forward our country has taken tonight, but it struck me that I really cannot grasp the momentousness of this occasion. It's not that I don't understand what it is, and it's not that I'm not terribly happy, because I am. It's more that I don't have the correct frame of reference.
When our parents were growing up, society was still segregated. A man like Barack Obama would not have been able to attend the same schools, or even to drink from the same water fountains. Racism is still evident in our society today, but most of us take it for granted that we can all go to the same places and do the same things. Intellectually, I've always known that, yeah, Obama is half-African-American, but I've never really thought of him as a racial figure, even when race was injected into the campaign. To me, he's always just been Barack Obama, a brilliant, even-tempered leader with a gorgeous smile (yes, I have a crush). Heck, he's not even the first Barack I've known (though the others have spelled their names differently), so I don't even think of his name as unusual.
Maybe that, in and of itself, is some kind of measure of how far society may have come: that someone can say to me, "We just elected Barack Obama president," and my instinctive response is, "Well, yeah, of course we did. Why wouldn't we?"