Election

I was going to sit with my tiny laptop and live blog the election results last night for you, but found out pretty quickly that I was too nervous and high-strung to even think about typing. I kept flipping back between local channels and CNN and Fox News. I always like to check in to see what the Sith Lords are saying over there. At one point, I was watching Fox and this blonde lady was on talking about Obama and she was saying, “well, you know, he’s only HALF black. He was raised by a white family and his grandmother that just died was white, his mother was white..” and I thought to myself at the time that this lady? And the people who are listening to her? Just don’t get it.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the historical importance of electing our first black president, but for me at least, this election wasn’t about electing a black man. It was about looking at the state of our country—involved in two wars with the current administration eyeing another while here at home we’re in complete total economic meltdown. It was about sitting there watching CNN and feeling the kick of my unborn son wondering if he’s going to grow up in a world where he’s going to have to go fight in one of these wars that drag on forever with no victory, no resolution or where his parents and the parents of his friends struggle as hard as they can to give him a good education and a bright future, but the money and the jobs just aren’t there.

To be honest, I can't tell you whether I would have cared more or less about our country's future if I just had myself to worry about. All I know is that when I think about what I want for my kid, I don't care if he's good-looking, or better than me at math or gay or straight or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I just want him to be able to dream as big as he wants and see ALL the possibilities around him and not be defined by the poor choices of an administration too short-sighted to care about anything but tax breaks for people who don’t need it and fighting an ill-advised fight in faraway places to no good end.

You can say whatever you want about how this election was about race, but I don’t believe it's everything. People, our world is SCARY right now and we needed hope that it wasn’t going to be like this forever. And I don’t care if Barack Obama was purple with pink and yellow dots, he promises that a better future exists right around the corner if we can just believe in it and just work towards things together. And I think we can, we really really can.