“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King

“We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.” President-elect Barack Obama, victory speech.

I couldn’t post yesterday. I was too overwhelmed. I spent much of yesterday reading around the internets, trying to put my finger on just how this felt to me. Of course, there was elation. Of course there was civic pride that we have finally taken this enormous leap as a nation and while we are by no means “over” racism, we have finally chosen someone based on the content of his character and have not let the color of his skin disqualify him. I was filled with pride for my hometown, Chicago. Look what forty years has wrought — Grant Park filled with all those elated, teary faces looking up in hope right there on the grounds where the old mayor sicced the cops on the hippies. It felt like something had been made right.

But those were not my battles. Civil rights was not my battle. Nor were the cultural battles of the sixties. My battle was a different one, and it feels today like the battle that began during the first election I ever cared about and argued with my parents over, the 1980 election that brought us Reagan, it feels like that battle is finally over.

I was in Paris in 1984 when Reagan was re-elected and I remember one night in a hotel room with a group of shiny privileged suburban American kids playing a word association game. They were the young Republicans who bought with glee into the idea that greed was good, that individualism was freedom, that we owe nothing to our fellow citizens but the opportunity to compete with us on a rigged playing field. They believed wealth would trickle down (while I, who had been raised broke among rich people, knew how unlikely that scenario was). They loved that after all the Free to Be You and Me sharing and caring hippie stuff we’d been raised with that Ronald Reagan came along and told them they were just fine the way there were, that shopping was good, that America was an empire and that we were the champions. And that as champions, they owed nothing to anyone. It was all theirs.

I hated it. I hated it then and I have hated it for the past 28 years. While I have friends and relatives who dearly wanted to see Hillary in the White House as a vindication of their dreams as women, I have wanted, since the beginning, to see Barack Obama, a man who has talked consistently of hope, of community action, of our highest historical ideals as a nation — I have wanted to see this man who talks the language we’ve seen debased and mocked these many years, and whose actions back up that idealistic language — that’s who I wanted to see elected to the presidency of the United States.

Gary Kamiya over at Salon has an piece entitled Taking our Country Back  where he parses the many many ways that Obama’s election signals the end of this particularly shameful episode in our history. I urge you to go take a look. As for myself, I am looking forward to a government that does not debase language as a smokescreen for robbery. I am looking forward to being governed by someone who has read widely and deeply in our national literature, and who is, like some of us, a gigantic nerd about the ideals upon which our great American experiment was founded, and has been carried out. Most of all, I am looking forward to being governed by someone who speaks to the American people like grown ups, who speaks to us as people who are capable of carrying complex ideas, and who calls us to be better than we are. Who calls to us to reach out to one another. Whose campaign made me go out there and knock on doors and talk to people in my neighborhood, no matter how uncomfortable that made me. I am looking forward to being lead, and governed by someone who believes that government can and must be a force for civic good, and it is a rising tide that raises all our boats, together.

I’m having a very hard time here at LivingSmall believing that Yes, We Can indeed do it this year, that we can vote a “transformational” leader into the White House. Despite the newspaper endorsements, despite Colin Powell’s strong endorsement, despite the 100,000 people gathered beneath the St. Louis arch — I’m fighting a nagging sense of despair.

The racism on display at the McCain rallies is so … what? horrifying? frightening? appalling? The open calls for violence, the gleeful finger-pointing and sneering claims that everything is just fine in America, that our wars are just and our financial system is not collapsing are so crazy that I find myself sinking beneath the weight of it all. It makes me wonder if this is what it felt like in Europe in the 30s, watching crazy leaders like Hitler and Mussolini rise to power.

It is my fervent hope that the numbers hold, and that Americans finally reject these politics of hatred and division. It is my fervent hope that we figure out a way to build an economy based not on geometric unsustainable growth (“the economics of the cancer cell” as Ed Abbey named it) but on some saner measure of growth, some sustainable model in which the income gap between rich and poor begins to shrink again and we see some way to rebuild our middle class. It is my fervent hope that we somehow manage to build a civic society based not on what divides us but on what unites us.

But in these last days of the election I am not as hopeful as I’d like to be. The forces of darkness that the powerful and entrenched are unleashing are very frightening to me. The financial crisis seems thus far only to be hurting the poor, who are being evicted from their homes (often, as in Chicago, from homes which they have been renting in good faith), while the rich seem to have figured out a way to back a truck up to the Treasury door to save their own untenable lifestyles. The calls from the right for voter disenfranchisement, the early stories about rigged electronic voting machines in West Virginia, the coordinated efforts to deligitimzie an Obama victory, these are all very frightening and disheartening.

I’ve been pretty sanguine until this past week or so. I always thought Obama would win, even way back when most of my friends were Hillary supporters. He won Southern Illinois, I kept telling people. Southern Illinois!? Not exactly territory for a Chicago black man with a weird name. But that wasn’t a race where he had a real opponent, and this time he does, not in McCain so much, but in the entrenched elitist core of the Republican party, that core who believes that the only “real” Americans are the ones who look like them, white, male, rich, “Christian.”

I grew up in the belly of the beast, in one of the true old-money suburbs where my classmates had brand names for surnames and where having to work at all, no matter what kind of money you made, was seen as something of a misfortune. I grew up in that world where blacks and jews were not allowed to join the country club, and where my parents generation still whispers when mentioning that the boy who grew up down the street married a black woman. The group who were, in the famous words of Molly Ivins, “born on third base and think they hit a triple.” They are powerful and unashamedly elitist and unshakeable in their beliefs. That’s why I left.

Instead of staying in the bubble and trying to either make that kind of money or marry that kind of money I’ve spent the past 25 years trying to figure out how to live in a joyful way outside of that system — the system where everything is judged by what kind of house you have and where you vacation and what clothes you wear and which schools you send your kids to. And Obama seems like the first leader I’ve ever seen who is talking to those of us outside the bubble. Colin Powell on Sunday referred to Obama as a “transformational” figure — and I just worry that at the last minute too many people will find that frightening, will not pull the lever for transformation, but will fall back on the old mess they know, the old mess with which they feel comfortable. But maybe I’m wrong — I certainly hope so. It’s hard to tell way out here where despite our Democratic governor and senators it’s still a pretty conservative, Republican state (and where there is still a big proportion of the voting population who will not vote for a black man). What’s the vibe feel like for the rest of you? Am I just panicking?