The Day After: Let the Healing Begin

Today I am very proud to be an American. 

I feel that pride every time the people of our great nation peacefully hand the reins of power from one president to another, regardless of whether the winner is the guy I voted for. It is what separates us from so many other countries. Our founders' great experiment with constitutional democracy, born in an era of monarchs and tyrants, continues to set the example for the rest of the world.  

But today is different. And it is different because of who Barack Obama is, and what he represents. 

Today is different because a black man has become the leader of the same United States of America that codified slavery into its constitution 220 years ago and continued to tolerate racial segregation, discrimination and persecution for generations after emancipating African and African-American slaves. 

Today is also different because it promises an end to decades of bitter division among Americans. Our nation has for too long been cleaved into warring factions, divided over civil rights, Vietnam, religion and social issues. Politicians first exploited these developing cracks in our society in the late 1960s, with the ascent of Nixon's Silent Majority. This slow-growing cancer on our nation metastasized over the past 16 years, with the ascents of the baby boomers Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to the White House. What once was a government of honorable, decent individuals, who held the best interests of the nation at heart despite their often strong disagreements, swiftly devolved into a death battle of glorified high school cliques. These overgrown children and their minions devoted more energy to pointing fingers, calling names and holding grudges in the selfish pursuit of political power than they did to doing the right thing for our country and its sovereign citizens. Control of government became a mere instrument for advancing the next electoral campaign. Our founders meant for this to happen the other way around. 

And today is different because it finally gives Americans something to cheer about after a long, depressing stretch of bad news that had even the most optimistic of patriots worried that the nation's best days may already have passed. Clinton ended his reign by defiling the White House and lying straight to our faces on national television. The ballot-box irregularities and Supreme Court resolution of the 2000 election left a potent, sour taste in the mouths of many Americans. Soon thereafter the bursting of the dot-com bubble and a spate of corporate scandals, including the fraudulent collapses of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco International and Adelphia Communications, hit the economy. Then came the shock, horror and deep national grief of 9/11, war in Afghanistan and a military misadventure in Iraq that has overstretched our budget, torn apart families and extinguished tens of thousands of lives. Since then we've also seen New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina. We've seen North Korea and Iran advance their nuclear weapons programs. And we've witnessed the inflation and explosion of a gargantuan real-estate bubble that has plunged us into the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. 

Today, with Barack Obama as president-elect, we can start the healing process. As an Ivy League-educated black man, raised largely by his white, working-class grandparents, he transcends racial, economic and social barriers. As the first post-boomer president, elected with an outpouring of support from long-apathetic young people, he transcends generations and is not bound by the identity politics and old grudges of the 60s and Vietnam. And as a man who campaigned on hope, confidence and civic responsibility — on inspiring the better angels of our nature instead of exploiting our worst fears — he can begin to give us something, at long last, to look forward to. 

I was particularly struck last night by the televised images of people pouring into the streets to celebrate Obama's victory — in Chicago's Grant Park, in New York's Harlem and Times Square, on college campuses throughout the nation and, indeed, on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House. This is truly like no other election we've seen. I am not ashamed to admit shedding tears at the sight, the sound, the gravity of it all, and I struggled to think of a modern parallel. The only other time I've seen such national jubilation was when the US ice hockey team improbably defeated the USSR at the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York. That moment, while it pales in comparison to this one, also inspired in us a sense of the possible, at a time when so much seemed hopeless.  

Obama's election is certainly not a panacea for all that ails us. He faces the toughest set of challenges of any incoming president in recent memory. And with the economy in serious trouble, President Obama surely won't be able to deliver everything that Candidate Obama has promised during the campaign. He will never be able to successfully prosecute two wars, reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels, expand health care and help restore our economic strength without support from other leaders of all ideological and political stripes, as well as from each and every citizen. 

Obama acknowledged this difficult fact during his victory speech last night. So did his opponent, Senator John McCain, in his gracious concession address. Leaving aside for a moment the mystery of where the Republicans had been hiding that John McCain for the past several months, these words from both men were quite encouraging to hear. Our new president-elect, hopefully, is indicating that he will not be an ideologue or a permanent campaigner but rather a problem solver — one who needs help from every American to tackle our truly formidable challenges. And the leader of the defeated Republicans invoked the spirit of sensible, bipartisan cooperation that he so valiantly stood for before lurching to the right to win his party's nomination. 

We, too, must embrace this spirit. Let the healing begin.