The End of an Error

[ellen_kushner]

When GWBush won his second term, I wore black for a week - not in NYC, where this sort of thing is de rigeur, but in Cambridge, Mass., where earth tones predominate. And over the past 4 years I have often had the awful feeling that I was living in a ghastly alternate reality, where everything had gone wrong in the world, and particularly in my

Comments

[dryfoo]

Thank you! Nicely said. The railroad metaphors I want are too much overused to express it: that we had gotten derailed, jumped the tracks, or at least gotten switched onto a bad siding somewhere; but that now we're back on a track we'd left a very long time ago. This feels like the right country again, that we're going in a good direction.

When I try to decide how long it's been wrong, I move from regretful to downright terrified. Has it been only these past 8 years? Or does it go back to when Reagan could get his laughs about the scariest words in English being "I'm from the government and I'm here to help"? Or farther back than that, even?

Perspective helps: maybe I can reconcile some decades of hateful politics as the national rip that LBJ predicted would be the result of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws of the 60s, and so that this election would be a sign of that rip beginning to heal over?

Anyway, I'm so glad to see Obama here and Dubya gone gone gone. If I never see another newspaper photo of that jackass "clearing brush" that'll be just fine. (Unless somebody plants a bunch of that Harry Potter tangleweed stuff.)