Last night electoral votes were counted, and with excitement rising--nervous excitement, because we feared the sudden crashing, crumbling, or poisoning of the various voting machines being used throughout the nation, a group of friends and I, all ObamaManiacs shifted between CNN, MSNBC, The Comedy Channel, and occasionally Fox (just to make sure they weren't messing with the results), waiting, hoping, watching, praying (even the atheists among us) that it would all end as we had for so long now and so very ardently wished, that our constant donations: five dollars here, ten there--another hundred ok, two hundred, why not, what could be more important--that our volunteering, knocking on doors, phoning hundreds upon hundreds of people, our rallying, our marches and chanting, our emailing and our passionate urging of those who leaned toward maintaining the awful status quo would have made the difference.
We perched in front of two TVs; we up and wandered back and forth, from room to room, waiting for the various states to be called; we ate nervously; chattered about the countries to which we planned to move if McCain and Palin won, the communes we would set up in Canada, or outside of Barcelona, in Italy perhaps, or Uruguay or Costa Rica or Brazil, or India, where you could find your old job (as Bill Maher suggested), then cleared our heads and cheered over Pennsylvania, groaned over Texas, reassured each other, let out the occasional scream of excitement and finally, finally, yelling, crying, applauding hugging each other, jumping up and down, calling children, brothers and sisters, old best friends on our cell phones, some of us weeping uncontrollably, we settled down and shut up long enough to listen to John McCain make his truly grand speech conceding to our President-elect and calling for unity and support for the new Commander-in-Chief.
We were a group of twenty or so, most of us over the age of fifty. Our hostess was a woman of ninety. We were not young. Not African-American; there was but one black woman in the group. We were gathered in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida, in which area we all live.
I had been a poll watcher on the morning shift, 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. at a precinct near my house, and I had returned to that same precinct to collect the numbers posted--as by law they must be--on the precinct door at 7 p.m., when the polls closed. McCain had won in my neighborhood, by some three-to-one margin, and my heart had provisionally sunk.
So, ecstatic, I, we watched Florida turn blue, all of us amazed, and incidentally relieved that we no longer had to apologize to our friends up north, or to ourselves for that matter, for living here.
As soon as McCain finished speaking, I had the sense that I had to go home, to hear Obama's speech alone, and that if I left immediately and drove fast, I might make it in time. So I grabbed my things and without a word to anyone, fled, it was fifteen minutes before midnight, and I sped home with the radio on, missing only the very beginning. But NPR described Obama, Michelle, and the children so well, I could see them in my mind's eye, through my tears, as I careened down the nearly empty Tamiami Trail.
And as I drove, I had the oddest thought. I thought, Bush made this possible. Bush did this for us. This was his legacy. It was this for which he would be remembered. He had made conditions in this country and relations between this country and others so bad, so unspeakably bad that he had effectively destroyed his own party, made it impossible for a Republican, probably any Republican to carry on.
He had paved the way for someone who truly offered change, change of every sort.
And the coincidence of Bush: this disaster who had been our president, who had brought our country to the brink of its demise in every area and the appearance of Obama: this black man, this brilliant and industrious black man who is elegant, articulate, even-tempered, thoughtful, intellectual, unflappable, who seems to have values and plans for the health and prosperity and growth of our country, well, it was the perfect storm meets the climate of one's dreams.
It suddenly occurred to me that if it weren't for Bush and Cheney, Neo-Cons and company, if it weren't for the disastrous mess they had made of our wonderful country: if it weren't for the lies they told us about everything until nothing whatsoever that Bush said was believable; if it weren't for the unnecessary and unforgivable war that they had determined and convinced us to wage in Iraq, a country that had done us no harm, a war in which so many Americans and Iraqis had been needlessly killed and maimed; if it weren't for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo ; the introduction of torture as a permissible modus operandi for the USA; the editing of our Constitution; unimaginable amounts of money both borrowed and spent, and the debt accrued, and the economic meltdown; and the cavalier and blatant disregard of the needs of our people, for whom they were supposed to be responsible; if it weren't for the inattention to the infrastructure of the country, to the environment, to the future of the planet; if it weren't for the unforgivable treatment of the poor in crisis, and the health care costs both plaguing and impoverishing our citizens, and the housing scams inundating us with foreclosures; and the job losses; the tax breaks for the wealthy while the poor got poorer and rich got obscenely richer; and the pathetic level to which education had sunk in this country, this wondrous election might not have been possible.
I did not like the first president Bush, but I positively loathed W, and it would never have occurred to me that anything good could be attributed to him, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we can thank him for leading us to the launching pad on which we stand today and for his (albeit inadvertently) paving the way for both the deconstruction of the corrupt mess that our "democracy" had become when Katherine Harris and The Supreme Court made him president by fiat and for the upcoming reconstruction of a government of which we can once again be proud.