Or Maybe I Woke Up on the Right Side of the Same Old Bed

The drive to campus this morning was blissful.

Last night, watching election results with colleagues, we compared our estimates of how many of our students voted. I extolled the virtues of my students, confident that at least 60 percent of them voted. And when I polled my first class, I happily found my guess was low. I gave them some praise - I didn't care who they voted for, I said, but I was proud of them for voting. Blissfully, I walked back to my office and prepared for the next class of the day.

Coming down the stairs on the way to my second class, I ran into my Dean who was beaming and asked, "Are you elated? I'm elated. I cried this morning when I listened to that speech again. I want to write all my professors who ever taught me any Civil Rights history. Aren't you elated?"

My Dean is effusive normally, but this was an entirely other level. This was Dean enthusiasm turned up to 11. And I was right there with her. I told her about my students voting, and that I felt like this is this generation's Kennedy moment. That I finally had an answer for a moment of history that I'd always remember that wasn't negative.

Then the conversation turned serious.

"It's a shame about what happened," she said.

Confused, I asked.

"About the graffiti," she said, with a sigh.

I didn't know about any graffiti, but it turns out someone on campus scrawled some ugly racial comments around campus. At least one piece of it was in an indelible form and required sand blasting to be removed, letting us know that Obama equals a racial slur. And in my second class, a student mentioned that there was evidently a Facebook stats flame war between Democrat and Republican student supporters.

A colleague reported later that a student in one of his classes said, "I'm tired of watching black people crying on TV just because a black man was elected President."

And another said a student told him of the graffiti, "It's just people expressing an opinion. What's the big deal?"

I've got some perspective on all this now, though for most of the evening, I and many of my colleagues were at wit's end. Evidently, we felt, we've failed in some truly fundamental way, not because of votes but because of a failure of empathy. It took me awhile to gain the perspective that my Dean had, able to keep that elation in the harsh light of our own campus events. Certainly, this election signaled that we've come a lot of metaphorical miles. But the morning after served as a reminder that we've got miles to go.

The Thing I Think I'll Remember...

...is the image of Jesse Jackson crying. Of all the things, I can't imagine, it'd be having to wait this long, to fight that much to get to see a moment like this.

One less dream deferred. One less dream denied.

I don't know what else I could say about this moment and this victory, so I'll hush and enjoy history as it happens.

Here's looking forward to a better, brighter future!

Thoughts on Last Night's Speech

Good speech by Hillary Clinton last night, I say. There were some sentiments there that I wish I'd heard more of during the run up to things. I think the best line in it was "This won't be easy. Progress never is."

If you missed the speech, it's worth checking out. You can find the full text here.

In conversations with friends and relatives over the past several years about politics, one of the things I've told them about my views - because that fear of taxes pervades American politics in such a strange and profound way - is that I don't mind taxes if they're paying for things I need. I'm willing to pay, to pay a little extra if it helps, so that there are services out there. I don't expect that the things I want in society will fall from the sky or that the country I believed I lived in just happens. Or that it, if it ever existed, it wasn't a rare thing that needed to be cultivated and cared for.

One of the interesting things about how politics - and religion - has worked in the U.S. is the strange relationship between earning money and helping those around you. It's funny to see what religion becomes when filtered through capitalism. And it is equally funny to realize that, like it or not, neither are systems one can completely reject, no matter the objections.

What I'd like to see in these discussions, in elections, in the world in general maybe is a little less of the golden age mentality. How do you "take back the country you love" if it was an ideal? Doesn't it make things more interesting if we think of it that way anyhow, as something that hasn't been reached but that must constantly be reached for?