Don't anybody dare stop talking about politics!
This is where the real fight begins.
I'm as happy as the next gal that the Bush era is over - but it was always going to be over, whatever the outcome of this particular election. Quite apart from the fact that he couldn't and didn't run for a third term, even his own party's candidate has been distancing himself from the Bush "legacy" so energetically as to signal very clearly that the ascendancy of conservative fundamentalists - economic as well as religious ones - is pretty well over.
What we get instead is yet another young, relatively untested, militarily untried, charismatic but inexperienced idealist. Purely on the face of it, I'm not sure this is as much of a revolution or "new dawn" as we are meant to believe.
That his charisma works on me (he's the cadidate I would want to have a beer with) and that his ideology agrees with mine is not sufficient reason to believe that he will make a good president. I'm sorry to burst the bubble, but it really isn't good enough for someone to just agree with me in order for the world to have become a better place, as some have expressed it.
He will be less corrupt, certainly. More independent, indubitably. There is no Cheney-like Grand Visier lurking in the shadows to threaten the integrity of his administration, which can only be a good thing. But these certain strengths are offset by the fact that the expectations of him are higher than of any president before him, including JFK, both inside America and out - and that's a huge risk of setting him up to be a disappointment, whatever he does.
At the end of the day, Obama is not the second coming or anything. It's not "historical" for a man with a white single mother[1] to be elected president. Bill Clinton's already done it. We need to get real about what this guy will and will not be able to achieve in the confines of the military and economic wreckage he's going to inherit, not to mention a Supreme Court stacked against him, a Justice Department almost scoured of non-Bushites, Guantanamo still operational and other threats to the legality of American political existense as embodied in the constitution. And we need to make sure he has the help and support he needs to claw back some recovery from all this mess.
So no, my USian friends, please don't post pictures of kittens. Please stay on the ball, stay engaged, stay as involved in the political process as you've been, continue to do the great and important work of being citizens that got us to this emotinal moment in the first place. Dry your tears of joy and dive back in - please, I beg you, don't just switch over to HBO in the comfortable knowledge that "your side" has "won".
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[1] I think this may need a little explanation, lest I should be accused of insensitivity towards the racial dynamics within America in general and the Human Rights struggle of the black population in particular. The fact is, I find the unquestioning identification of people like Barack Obama, Halle Berry and Tiger Woods as "Black" or worse, "African-American", to be nightmarishly racist. What it basically says - and the gut churningly scary bit is that both liberal whites and blacks are saying this - is that if you have any black blood in you, you can not be included in the "white" commonwealth. It doesn't even matter if you're exactly split down the middle and were brought up in a white family, if there's any black in you then you're black and that's it. This attitude overwhelms me with revultion, because it reflects the old and still not sifficiently dead views about miscegenation in the US, and evokes the spectre of the Nazi classification of anyone with as little as one Jewish grandparent as sufficiently "contaminated" to be subjected to the Final Solution. Barack Hussein Obama is American, with everything it means to be American, including a diverse racial and cultural background. That is something to be proud of. I don't get why it's not enough.