"Our drum is broken"

It's been a long time since my last post. As you may have noticed, I follow politics a bit and this is a season unlike no other. November Presidential Elections are always a big time for me, but this year it is 10 times normal. I started following Barack Obama after watching his 2004 Democratic Convention Speech, amazed at the idealism of his convictions and his view of what makes our country great.

When Obama announced, I was in the first wave of donors. I'm still not sure why, and though I have given it serious thought, the only real reason I can come up with is that, like Mulder from the X-Files, I need to believe. I need to believe that I live in a country that really is like the one idealized in my youth - that cared for its people and fought for people around the world. My adult life has seen little evidence that any of those things I learned as a child - of the ideal of American exceptionalism. I don't know why it is so important to me, but I've come to accept that it is. I have traveled around the world and met many amazing people along the way, and I know that they too love their country. Perhaps it is something shared, a sort of tribalism that recognizes the essentially great and unique aspects of our respective societies that live more in our idealism than in reality.

It is perhaps the very idea of hope that attracted me to this campaign. For the first time in my adult life, I have an investment in hope that is tied to this election. And hope can be a frightening thing as you get older and have seen it dragged through the mud like a villain in some old movie. It has been hard to write much lately for fear of revealing my anxiety around the possibility that this would happen again. If you have followed this election, you have seen the efforts to do just that by the McCain campaign and apologists. I've watched videos of scenes from across my country of people that have said such terrible things - and the scariness of their fear and anger and beliefs in things I was taught didn't exist in my country any more. I ran across this video recently and it actually gave my hope a boost:



I have never been as invested in the outcome of an election in my life. And while an Obama win would at least begin to justify my faith in my country's essential humanity, a loss would, I fear, send my essential optimism - the fuel of my very existence - to the bottom of a very deep well. I doubt that I will write here again before the election is done and the results are unequivocal and I wonder now whether I will be writing an obituary or a birth announcement. I'm happy that it will be less than 2 weeks before I know. The wait has, on this occasion, taken its toll and I long to be free of it.