Some Thoughts Before The 2009 Inauguration

This is not my moment. It’s a moment to be savored most by people whose history spans the high and low points of these United States.

Yet it’s impossible not to be caught up in it. I watched on the Internet as Barack Obama launched his presidential bid, went to his rally in Oakland a few days later, and planned to go to a rally in Reno, Nevada, in early 2008 but was incapacitated by a back problem—ironically, on my way back from the library with three books by the author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited by Obama and Why He Can’t Win.

I spent the primary election night in California with some local media types who were avidly pro-Obama, heard his nomination acceptance speech in Denver from the floor of Invesco Field, and watched his victory speech on TV at home in Oakland, cooking Hoppin’ John to wish him good luck. But I didn’t vote for Obama—I voted for Cynthia McKinney—and I’m as cynical as ever about hoopla, especially any and all hoopla about a politician.

Since last Thursday night, the local TV news has been featuring stories about people setting off for Washington to witness a moment they never thought they’d see in their lifetimes. Having not experienced the history that informs that way of looking at things, I find it surprising; just as I found it surprising that on the day after the election many African Americans expressed their own surprise that white people voted this man into office.

Whatever the future holds—and it won’t be rosy—this is still a moment to savor if only for the catharsis many hope it will bring to a nation that blundered onto the world stage imperfectly formed and, in my view, continued blundering as its agricultural, industrial, commercial, and military strength grew. It blunders still, hampered by a system of representative government that stifles any growth in alternative political viewpoints, and by a legal system that gives the same rights to corporations that the Constitution gives to individuals, effectively enslaving us all to nameless, faceless entities from which there is no escape and against whose shoddy practices there is no remedy.

But the big news is that an African American family will be living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave above stairs instead of below them—and for many millions of people here in the U.S. that is a matter of huge, positive significance. And so it should be, given the circumstances of history.

So let’s party all day and night on January 20, 2009, because on January 21 the present circumstances will still be there and the struggle will continue.

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