Audacity of hope

Today I am just going to write my words. I went into the coffee shop this morning, and as usual the baristas asked me how I am doing, and I had been thinking about it. I have been continuing a little overwrought emotionally, after holding my hopes in check for so many months before Obama's election, and carefully, right up through election night, not saying anything prematurely prideful that might attract the attention of vengeful gods. Last week I may even have privately promised any stray Powers that I will to go to church, if only this just wouldn't be screwed up. Less than a year ago I was enough of a cynic to say, No Way In Hell; now hell's done froze over, and we gots ice skates all around.

"I have been waiting for this election for forty years," I told them. "I'm like, just a minute, where am I? what happened?" How could it have taken my country so long to join me, here in the future, where my hair has gone gray with waiting?

Joe laughed, which is why I always talk to him. "Yeah, it's about time."

"Darn right," I said. That seemed a little mild. "Fucking-A right," I said, feeling like the foul-mouthed college student inside, and he laughed.

The first election I had any involvement with was Johnson's election over Goldwater in 1964. We were living on Grand Boulevard in Binghamton, and I had made a small poster for my wall from some news photo of the two candidates. It was a contest against a Republican party that was allied to the John Birch Society, most unrepentantly bigoted, and at the time ancient news stories about historical Klan lynchings were being unearthed and published in anthologies as sensational paperbacks alongside shocking material on mass murderers, so the horrors of Jim Crow were no longer concealed by the polity. Johnson had been carrying on the Democratic legacy of the mysteriously martyred Kennedy, legislation that would be called The Great Society. When Johnson won, the term landslide was used. I had no idea it would be so rare in the future. I decorated my poster with hurrahs for our side.

It is curious that a mere four years later, Johnson had become a symbol of the System, held responsible for the war in Vietnam, and just another of the old white men who ruled the world. He was compared to Andrew Johnson, the president who had been impeached while in office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Hah! We had no idea how much worse a president could be.

I was in eighth grade during the 1968 election, and my parents were both Dangerously Radical Professors. I made posters for the Socialist Workers Party who were active on campus, at the campus elementary school I was going to, presumably lobbying the voting students who occasional walked our hallways. On one of them I used a clipping of a famous photo of a dead baby in Vietnam ("Q. and babies? A. and babies") which was actually torn down. The primaries of course had started while I was still in seventh grade, but they held far less interest than they do today. My issue was the war, although I held a growing cynicism about the general raping and pillaging of the earth and world domination of my country's military-industrial complex. I was a hold-out against the two-party system, which naturally dominated the polling amongst the eighth grade. It was a remarkably comfortable class: I was not particularly ostracized or humiliated for being such an oddball. Either that, or by that time I was rather used to it.

The disasters of Nixon's administration and the continuing Viet Nam War would dominate the political landscape during my years in high school and college.

In the fall of 1972 I was still just seventeen. The first election I was able to vote in was the next spring midterm election, in which Paul Soglin was first elected mayor of Madison. I took that as a hopeful sign, and understood clearly that I would very seldom in the future have the person I had voted for actually win office. I also voted for local character Eddie Ben Elson for State Superintent of Public Instruction, whose platform was to abolish compulsory education, a cause I could get behind, given my experience. Of course he never won any public office. Later he ran for Judge (he was a lawyer) with the slogan, Live And Let Live. It made a stunning poster.