05 November 2008

Galvanized

Hey now! Hey now!

Time for the dream team! (Stretch it out all long and Spearhead-style for maximum effect.) As someone who recently made her father-in-law smile when my sweetie and I said we were going to see Michael Franti and Spearhead, which we described as "socially conscious hip-hop," I suddenly feel like it's my kind who are in the mainstream. Talk about a new sensation. I love the way it makes me feel like America is part of the world again. No longer a superpower standing alone in its own universe with its own laws.

Everyone is suiting up for the big game ahead. Time to get some work done, and with a Democratic majority and Obama at the helm of this good ship (really she still is good at heart and that's what this election brought out in people), we have a chance at reversing course and setting a new direction, one that adapts to our existing resource pool -- which is vast and includes raw resources, infrastructure, an educated and willing workforce, support for innovation, and millions of people who just voted in this election wanting something or at the very least someone to believe in, to work hard for.

The experience of this election does make me feel like rolling up my sleeves and getting to work in a new way. I'm less fearful. Although I've decided not to use the real drug company or name (you who have heard/read my rants know which drug I'm talking about) in my story. I decided I like the weird side effects in my fictional drug better anyway. I will, however, include a bibliography to offer some source material to back myself up with folks like the former high-level government employee whom I interviewed, who reminded me that there can be malcontents in our midst: "Whistleblowers aren't always model employees." I want people like that to know I am not just pulling this out of thin air. That people really do play dirty pool for money and here is how and why they do it. Because it's not only the malcontents who blow whistles. Perhaps I'll write this book and this kind of stuff will come to look like a dusty old relic of an outmoded economic system. People will write me off as some kind of paranoid crank while I'm like some 1960s radical who can't quit carping about corporate malfeasance well into my eighties.

Last night I kept coming back to my computer for the election maps and to watch this barometer of feelings streaming past again and again last night as the results were coming in and the race had not yet been decided. Suddenly the results just flooded in, and Obama had handily won his Electoral College victory had been handily won by 9 our time. Just as I was finishing reading to our little one, we heard the whoops in the street. I jumped back online again and the words from Obama supporters were all positive: hopeful, elated, victorious, proud, overjoyed, amazed, and the everpresent sassy, which appeared in both camps' postings. It's fun to set it to 11PM Eastern Time and watch the emotions shift gears.

Today I also feel jetlagged, maybe in sympathy for those hard-traveling campaign workers of all stripes. It ain't easy at any level of the campaign. And my heart goes out to those conservatives who didn't get their pick, too. I can't help it, being the bleeding-heart liberal that I am. I know they thought they were holding some line, but it turned out that line was drawn in sand, and there are too many of us on the "other side."

It is just thrilling to be here to see this happen in our country, right now. Another forty-something woman said to me today, "I really didn't think we'd see this happen in my lifetime. An African-American or a woman in the White House." All present agreed. She likened it to the way people said to her grandmother back in her day, "Oh, sure, when they put a man on the moon."

This election has been a great reminder that someone like Ferran Adria could still come up with a process for plunging purgatory into a deep freeze. It may prove true that anything is possible, and this certainly proves, again, that one person can bring about great change.

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