Melodramatic Post (Suck It.)

"If it were possible for me to get to the United States on my bicycle, I would," - Joseph Ochieng, a 36-year-old carpenter who celebrated in Nairobi's Kibera shantytown, one of Africa's largest slums.

(This post is a little bit much, especially the quotations...but you can suck it. It's rare to feel this excited anymore. I definitely have a variety of concerns about the future, but I'll talk about those later.)

The dialogue that has emerged from the currently election has really re-energized me. I think that I just needed to put one in the Win column, (just one please!) having attained political consciousness during the Bush Era and not knowing anything else except division, bitterness, anger, and a desperate sense of frustration. Instead of tearing out my hair in disbelief over the buying and selling of alienation and division, I love reading stories of Republicans tearing up with pride over the fact that Obama won the election. I love seeing pictures of Kenyans in the streets carrying an Obama poster. I love that people stayed up all around the world to watch our election returns, and cheer and hug ferociously over a foreign politician's victory. I think that no matter where you stand on specific issues of policy, this election is the earning and exemplification of American Exceptionalism – this is the moment where we can be proud that our ideals and our choices are one in the same, and that we have the intelligence and the moral compass to attempt to right our wrongs. Democracy works: When governments, politicians, and policies fail, there must be some accountability. I like that if even for a moment, we are the good guys again. That we are the Shining City on the Hill, and that we will forever work to improve ourselves because our greatness lies in our efforts for progress, not in our DNA. Just as there is no inherently superior race, there are no inherently superior nations.

America will now have a president with half-brothers in Kenya, old schoolmates in Indonesia and a view of the world that seems to be based on respect rather than confrontation.

That matters. Under George Bush America’s international standing has sunk to awful lows. This week Americans voted in record smashing numbers for many reasons, but one of them was an abhorrence of how their shining city’s reputation has been tarnished. Their country will now be easier for its friends to like and harder for its foes to hate. . . .

Like most politicians, Mr Obama will surely fail more than he succeeds. But he is a main of great dignity, superior talents, and high ideals. In choosing him, America has shown once again its unrivalled capacity to renew itself, and to surprise. - The Economist

The last 8 years have truly left me feeling utterly exhausted and sad. Good ideas were discarded for dogma. Science was discarded for religion. The Old Ideas of the 60s dominated the New Ideas. Hatred replaced commonality. Intelligence and education became liabilities, while instincts and dogmas became law. Freedom in every sense except the (wealthy) economic was restrained. And for that matter, increasing the marginal tax rate by three percent on the very wealthiest Americans became the dividing line between Socialism and True Patriotism. Language and ideas were mangled and distorted so that the Clean Air Act loosened pollution controls, the Healthy Forests Initiative increased logging, and our President preached freedom and justice while torturing and detaining foreign citizens without process or rule of law.

"Today, reality in America has superseded fantasy. ... Americans have struck a deadly blow to racism all over the world. Americans have regained themselves and have regained the American dream. The picture of the U.S. that was disfigured by the Republicans in the past eight years fell from the wall today. The picture of the America we had in our minds has taken its place," - Prominent Saudi columnist Dawood al-Shirian.

I’m also thrilled that we’re in for a renewal of politics with ideas. We will have a president who believes in ideas. Who believes in thinking, and debating, and engages in intellectual battle with rigor. He understands the law. He has read and taught the Constitution. He understands the limits of law at the most abstract levels, and has spent time organizing poor communities at the most concrete. This is not someone who has all of the answers. This is a man who will be fighting, searching, and applying a vast intellect and ability to find real solutions for real problems. I’m not going to like a lot of them, I’m sure, but at least I know they will not be pre-packaged and at worst, at least they won’t be stupid or blind.

No matter our policy differences (and there are some), what offers me the most comfort is that Obama and I live in the same world. We see the same world. The same problems, the same force for good and hope for good, the common bonds of citizenship and humanity, the strength in unity and the disaster of disunity. When he speaks, the world he describes is the world I see and want to see. It’s not completely divorced from all sense of reality, morality, and decency that I see and want to see in the world. It makes sense. We see the world from the same place and we see the same goal for our country and the world. And as easy as that should be, it feels utterly miraculous that it has happened.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can. - Andrew Sullivan

(I'm currently trying to work out what I believe in bullet points. Maybe someday I'll post that.)