I Can See Clearly Now…

After Barack Obama broke through the storm clouds of American politics to bring some sunshine and optimism back to these shores two weeks ago, many of my friends have been describing a kind of reawakening; an emergence from a dark, dark place where we have long resigned ourselves to staying…until visas could be had for us to be elsewhere.

In the last two weeks I have realized, too, that I have been in a kind low-grade depression since being back from London. Lots of terrible things happened during that transition, but existing (such an apt word) in a Bushian America has not allowed many of those exit wounds to heal properly; in many respects a lot of my brain power had been trained on getting by…and plotting an eventual escape to…I have no idea. To describe how I have felt the last three years is not yet fully possible, but like a true new yorker, one word that my soul offers up is “mugged” — like someone hit me over the head and I have been in a concussed state for a long, long time. This goes beyond politics, of course. When you are trying to find sanctuary and stability at home, and you are offered instead a bitter indifference, and abandoning of reason, and utter contempt for who you are, then…well that is Bedlam, Bellevue; it is mad.

I know Obama is not Jesus; he is not even Moses. But he is intelligent and, judging from all the historical records about him, a stickler for promise keeping. This world needs promise keepers. I need a promise keeper. The tears so many Americans shed on November 4th and 5th were not exclusively about electing a black or mixed-race president and therefore willfully creating a “moment in history”; those tears were a big, heaving sigh of relief, they were the easing of an oppressive, suffocating state where we all collectively felt our synapses come alive after being tormented and tortured for so long. Americans allowed themselves to be openly smart again. As Maya Angelou said on one of the news networks, “Americans voted against their ignorance.”

The Obama victory was intensely personal for at least 52 million people, many of whom witnessed the ugliness of Katrina, saw through the twisted assertions of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their cohorts (yes, you too Condi Rice and Colin Powell), saw the uncheck greed of Wall Street fat cats, and the horror of the Minneapolis Bridge collapse. It is these events and the callousness that provoked and greeted them, that people really responded to. When Obama talks about rebuilding the infrastructure of this country, I find it phenomenal that he was able to hold back rage, for while the US fights its two-front war, the very buildings, bridges, and levees that supposedly bind this country together have splintered, rotted, degraded, disappeared. I won’t even talk about health care.

For me, the arrival of Obama means that I can be a nerd again. My low-grade depression was partially brought on by the anti-intellectualism that was so pervasive during the Bush years. It became almost criminal to have an opinion, to use words longer than five letters, to acknowledge the nuance inherent in language and deeds, to appreciate the complexity of big things and the simplicity of the straightforward. It is nice to have my mind back, and it is great to have a national leader who has a mind.