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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

watchtower

As a kid, I always imagined that I would be in my fifties before the nation elected a black president; in this hypothetical scenario, the gender barrier would fall first (in my forties), and in both cases, the candidates would need a conservative or Republican label to balance out the bias that Southern voters would have against them. Yesterday, we put that theory to the test, when the electorate was asked if a left-leaning black man with an Arab name and roots in the Chicago political system was the right man to lead them out of the wilderness and into an era where past political assumptions were no longer valid.

The answer? Yes He Is.

The most exciting thing about this election is that the future is much more malleable than it was before. It's likely that things will not turn out quite as well as Obama and his supporters are hoping, but I think it is undeniable that the probability of change is much greater than it was yesterday. America is not a country of gamblers, but the election of Obama indicates that it knows when to cut its losses and try something new. For McCain supporters (and Palin supporters), there is a positive message to take away from all this: if you care enough to participate in our electoral process, you can make a difference.

At the same time, I have to imagine that the idea of an Obama-type campaign - with its extensive volunteerism and rabid enthusiasm - is actually quite terrifying to politicians of either party who are facing re-election in 2010 or 2012. And that is fantastic.

Congratulations, Barack. A significant portion of my projections for the next two or three decades have just been wiped clean by your unprecendented campaign; this internal view of the country and where it's headed is by no means a blank slate, but it's much more interesting than it was when I was a kid. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Labels: culture, narcissism

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I guess we should start with kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in a local Catholic school despite the fact that we a) had no money and b) weren't Catholic. It was a very tumultuous time in my life. My teacher was the meanest I would have until my sophomore year of college, when a stubborn Korean man tried to teach me formal languages and automata using only six words of English. While I was in kindergarten, I met a beautiful little blonde girl named Erica whom I adored for the entire year. She always seemed kind of interested in me, but I could never get her to commit to anything.

Every so often, our teacher would stop giving us condescending lectures about our relative intelligence and read to us. One day, she brought in a new book, Danny and the Dinosaur, and I fell in love with it before she had finished reading. I asked if I could borrow the book, and she agreed to lend it to me for a few days.

I took the book home and I never brought it back.

It never occurred to me to ask for my own copy of the book. At some point, I decided that if I mentioned the book to my parents, they would put the pieces together and figure out that I had already stolen it. I hid the book under my mattress so no one would find it; every so often I would sneak it out to read it, but it would never sit beside the many other dinosaur books that lined my bookshelf. I was a fugitive.

And I still couldn't get the girl, so I was a heart-broken fugitive. Erica and I would always end up playing with Mike Verville, and he would suck up all of her attention. Mike happened to be my best friend, so I couldn't bad-mouth him, but it seemed like Erica would fawn over him for even the slightest thing; I was a clear second place.

My only respite came from the other members of my class, who had no academic prospects at all (at least, that's what our teacher told them). When we read Stone Soup in class, the teacher decided it would be fun if we actually made stone soup; everyone brought in supplies, and we made a fairly bland chicken soup. Unfortunately, one kid (Philip) managed to get his part wrong; this was pretty hard to do, since the book described stone soup as a bunch of random stuff thrown into water. The teacher pointed this out to the rest of the class and chewed him out.

Stone soup may seem trivial compared to reading and arithmetic, but kids are very impressionable at that age, and you can't let them slip up. If you don't get stone soup right, you won't be able to pass the SSAT (Standard Soup Achievement Test), and if you don't pass that, then you won't get into the smart kids' reading group in first grade, and then you'll never make the honor roll, and then you will fail out of school and spend the rest of your life working at Dollar General, blowing all of your money on Keno and cheap European cigars.

At the end of kindergarten, I had learned three things:

Adults should not be trusted.
Uniforms were uncomfortable.
Girls will only pay attention to you if you ignore them.

The next twenty years served to more or less confirm all of this, so I'm just going to gloss over them:

I grew up in Rhode Island. There were five Dunkin' Donuts within a mile of my home. My town was filled with people who, at any given moment, were working at a strip mall or spending money at a strip mall. After almost two decades of eating donuts and buying things we didn't need, my friends and I graduated from high school. Diploma in hand, I moved to New York so I could learn about computers and develop a caffeine addiction.

By the time I was halfway through college, I had grown tired of the Northeast lifestyle. Too hectic, too greedy, too frustrating. Too damn cold. I moved to North Carolina after graduation, and it makes me happy. There are more trees here.

I currently work for a big, blue company, where I spend my days building air castles with imaginary Legos. It's a lot of sitting and typing. Sometimes just sitting, if I have a lot of meetings on my calendar.

When reading this blog, please keep in mind that I am but a lowly programmer, and nothing I say here reflects on the attitudes, decisions, or future plans of the other people working for my employer. You should not put stock in anything I say (literally), nor should you assume that corporate executives are reading this blog and making decisions based on my input. If I were that important, I wouldn't be sitting here typing to you people.