Waking Up

Last night, when the horns and screams overwhelmed the barriers of my city windows and I finally tore myself away from the television, I went downstairs to see what was going on, and caught sight of something I’d never quite seen before, my children.

I had my twins after 9/11. It seemed an incredibly selfish thing to do - to actively seek to bring children into a world I no longer trusted. The notion that I was ever safe or secure was always an illusion, but it was a pretty convincing one for someone with no personal memory of the war in Vietnam and no first-hand experience living in a nation at war until Desert Storm. For almost six years now, I have been raising children under the surreal haze of George Bush. I have been trying to nurture values of honesty, kindness, open-mindedness and fairness. I have placed a premium on creativity, cooperation, thoughtful behavior and the ability to listen. I have tried desperately to maintain my own sense of hope, faith and dignity. To do this, has basically required a complete disassociation from reality. Until last night.

When Barak Obama was declared the president-elect of the United States, a friend who was watching with me said, “I feel like I’m waking up from a dream.” And so it was. When I opened the front door for the first time, at 12:00 am, I was in my pajamas. My neighbor screamed to me from across the street and I went running into the road, barefoot, to hug her. When I opened the door a second time, at 1:00 am, I saw things I’ve never seen before. The most incredible sight was a group of young, african-american women shouting with glee, and giving the thumbs up to an officer inside a police car who was leaning out the window to return the elated gesture. Both parties were laughing, with cell-phones clicking to capture the moment.

This desire to be outside and to find a way to express the overwhelming emotion of having elected Obama president, was responsible for the curious site, a block away, of crowds gathered on four corners of a busy intersection with no purpose, it seemed, but to cheer and take pictures of one another. Countless automobiles, taxis, garbage trucks and police cars drove by honking their horns and everyone roared some more. My husband said it was as if we all needed to go outside and howl at the moon.

That is why my sleeping children looked so very different to me when I descended the staircase. I had put them to bed in one world, but I knew they were going to wake up in another. The haze had lifted. The world looked much more like the one I had hoped to bring them into: a complete mess, yes, but a place I wanted to live in.

Hijacked

I didn’t want to write about Sarah Palin. I’ve been avoiding it all week. I had a purpose, in titling this blog iklektik ink. It was to set up the expectation that you could find anything on these pages. I imagined that if you were avoiding work or the laundry or your children, you might just check your bookmark, read a post to kill some time and be surprised in the process. But given the stakes in this election, I have come to accept that my mind is totally consumed. I am unable to think of other things, even when I want to.

Last night I stayed awake to watch Charles Gibson interview Sarah Palin on Nightline. You will have to imagine me, in bed with my already large eyes open wider than normal and my jaw hanging ajar. Sarah Palin does not read the newspaper. Sarah Palin does not have a basic grasp of what has been happening in the world for the past eight years. To be in line for the presidency and not know what the Bush Doctrine is? It’s unconscionable. I don’t know whether to thank John McCain for giving the nation fair warning of what a “maverick” presidency will look like or to smack him for being so utterly reckless with our fates. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

Mostly what kept me awake was ruminating about how little we value intelligence and critical thinking in this country. These are not qualities we look for in leaders. In 2000 I was convinced that it was precisely Bill Clinton’s abuse of his own intelligence that delivered George W. Bush the election. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was a scandal not because of the sex but because of the extremes Clinton went to in order to bend language so that he could avoid telling the truth. Voters were furious and they wanted someone incapable of doing that. In loped Dubbya.

Haven’t we had enough of this experiment? Is it possible that eight years of George W. Bush has not made it eminently clear that “a guy you could have a beer with” was not a good criterion for choosing our head of state? Are we really so insecure as a nation that we need our leaders to be recognizable figures from our daily lives? Don’t we want our leaders to be better than us? What happened to the notion of greatness? Since when does being an ordinary Joe (now, Jane) qualify someone to lead the most powerful nation on earth?

Sarah Palin was chosen to deliver votes for John McCain. I think she can do that. She was not chosen to appeal to women like me. She was chosen to appeal to religious and conservative women who are thrilled to see their views (limited as they may be) represented. They are going to go to the polls, they are going to get their men to go to the polls, and perversely, they are going to feel proud doing it. I hope I am wrong. I hope John McCain has underestimated the intelligence of our nation. I hope he has fatally sided with a 20th century version of our nation as a white, Christian, nation that can ignore the rest of its citizens without consequence. I hope Obama is more than just a possibility of what may come in the 21st century. I hope we’re in the 21st century.

Hillary's Women

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Watching Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech at the democratic convention I was struck by the contrast between the facial expressions of the young women in the audience and those of Hillary’s contemporaries. The women of my generation looked like this:

We were beaming, chipper, elated. Our guy won, and the woman who lost to him was rocking the house. We felt proud of her now that she was no longer a threat to an Obama presidency and we could take a moment to revel in the girl-powerness of it all.

This is how the women of my mother’s generation looked:


For the first time, I truly understood what they had lost. Hillary's women wanted more than someone who shared their opinions (many candidates could have laid claim to that territory) they wanted a peer, someone whose views were shaped by the same forces that had shaped their own. I am a die-hard Obama fan. My support for him began with the thrill of his oratory, a desire to stomp on the racial lunacy that divides this nation, and a steadfast belief in his integrity. But in the end, I've realized that my support comes down to a much baser sentiment. He is six years older than I am and I want to see him in the White House. I want my generation to have its turn to lead before we become the next generation.

In the faces of Hillary’s women I saw the disappointment of the entire feminist movement, the movement that has never quite seen its dream come true. If Obama becomes president there are countless members of the civil rights movement who will live to see that their struggle had value. That's all these women were asking for.

I watched Hillary’s speech not in Denver, not on television, but on YouTube five days after she spoke, something my own mother – who died 11 years ago today – could not have imagined. I am one of those young women, if at 41 I’m even allowed to call myself young, who has faulted Hillary for not being the kind of woman I wanted to see as a leader. She seems so uncomfortable in her own skin, so dogged by questions of cookies and headbands and pants-suits, so unclear about how to embrace her power. My generation demands an ease of presentation, a security of identity that Hillary could never pull off. Many of us, myself included, are missing a sensitivity chip when it comes to appreciating the battle wounds of the women who paid such a high personal cost to ensure that we have the opportunity to make choices about the kinds of work and the kinds of relationships we want for ourselves. It’s no wonder that these women, Hillary's women, wanted one of their own as commander-in-chief. They have suffered for a very long time, without reward, for the happy-faced blond waving an Obama flag next to them.