Yeah, He Won, But That’s Not The Reason To Be Proud Today

Congratulations to President-elect Obama, blah blah blah.  I disagree that we all woke up to a new reality, but I agree it’s the end of an era.  My youngest daughter will never know a time when presidents were only older white men.  That does make me proud.

But even the historical significance of Obama’s win isn’t the real reason we should pat ourselves on the back this morning.  Yesterday we, the Joe the Plumbers and Sixpacks and old ladies wearing bathrobes and house shoes lined up in an orderly fashion, sometimes in lines stretching for hours, to quietly choose who we will fractiously follow for the next four years.  Without a fuss, fight, or mob action in the streets we handed off control of the most powerful military in the world.  By paper and electron we entrusted to a quasi-stranger our finances and our hopes for the future.

And then we went home.

We waited patiently for the polls to close and the results to be tallied.  We trusted it would be done honestly and accurately.  For the most part we conceded defeat with grace and mostly accepted victory with magnanimity.  We went to bed and woke up the next day and went to work or school or just on with our lives, having a vague satisfaction of a job well done but focused on the tasks and needs of the day ahead.  Another election had passed, and life went on.

The fact that we see this as normal is incredible.  The fact that we, the toiling masses, have the ability to infuse a person with the power that comes with the presidency is extraordinary.  The fact that we don’t see it that way is mind boggling.

Sometimes it comes across very clearly that we do live in the greatest nation on Earth.

This entry was posted on 5. November 2008 at 09:14 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.