Sixth time’s the charm

We can’t stop talking about it.

It’s three days later and we are still riding the high that comes from a sense of having helped do something meaningful in the world.

The kids, though, have moved on.

Before the election, they couldn’t stop talking about it either. They were excited because we were excited. But it was also another piece of the adult world that they didn’t quite understand, that didn’t make sense in their own world view, with its relative lack of history, its inexperience, in most cases, with prejudice and hate. They believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but they don’t really believe in slaves, which seem even less plausible. They don’t call people who look like the President Elect Black or African-American. They call them people. Or maybe, if pressed, “people with brown skin.” And we have protected this view, because it’s the view we wish we all could have.

But in the same way they don’t understand why we make such a fine point about race, they don’t understand the two-party system. What’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican, between an Obamaniac and a McCainist?

On Tuesday, as AJ and I walked home from school, he asked, “Why does everyone think one guy is really great and the other guy is going to, like, blow up the world or something?”

I laughed and tried to explain something I’m not sure I fully understand myself. “They believe very different things. I mean, they both really want to do the best thing for our country, but the things they think are best are very different.”

“Is that like issues?”

“Issues are the things they think are important and the things they’re talking about during their campaign. Things like the war in Iraq, the economy, health care….These are all really big and complicated problems and each candidate has suggested some solutions, but their solutions are very different from one another.”

“So that’s why they hate each other?”

“They don’t hate each other. This is just what people do when they are running for President.”

But then I stopped, because, I thought, this isn’t exactly what people always do. I can’t ever remember an election so polarized, an election where I felt so invested in a single outcome.

I voted in my first Presidential election in 1988, when I was 21 years old. That year Bush the first ran against Michael Dukakis, who at the time was the governor of the state I was living in (although I was still registered in the state my parents lived in, Indiana). The campaign was a mess. It was the year of Gary Hart’s affair with Donna Rice, the year where Joe Biden was accused of plagiarism (thanks to a tape leaked by Dukakis’ team), the year Jesse Jackson, the man who was crying at Obama’s victory speech, almost made a go of it. But the infighting and incompetence of the Democrats discouraged me. And the Reagan-Bush machine terrified me. So this idealistic young voter, the daughter of two Independents, cast a vote for a third party candidate, an African-American woman named Lenora Fulani who had impressed me with her speech on my college campus. I knew she didn’t have a chance. It was a vote of protest. My very first election and I was already jaded.

And for the five Presidential elections I’ve voted in since then, I have voted against someone, not for someone. Until now. Number six. I’m all in. Finally.

But AJ doesn’t have that history. He was three for the last Presidential election, probably the election that depressed me most of all. He doesn’t remember it. Obama is all he knows. No wonder he doesn’t understand why his mother tears up at the sight of the single word headline in Tuesday’s New York Times. To him, it was just an election. To me it was The Election.

For AJ, Obama is likely to become the first President he remembers. I was born in the last years of the Johnson era, but my earliest recollection of a Presidential inauguration is from the Watergate hearings, which I remember because my parents were glued to the news. But I didn’t think of Nixon as a President but as someone on trial. The first President I remember was Gerald Ford, who took office the year I turned 7, the same age AJ is now.

I love the idea of an older AJ with Obama as the model for a Presidential figure. As much as I have tried to impart on him the momentousness of this moment in our history, I am even more in love with the idea that he will grow up in a world that never knew that African-Americans couldn’t be President. It’s the continuation of my generation, the first to come of age after the Civil Rights era. As children, we heard only stories we could hardly believe wrapped up in recordings of the fairy-tale voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. played over and over again by adults who wanted us to understand.

Is there a way for our children to at once remember the historic nature of this election and at the same time not understand it at all? I can suddenly see the world through AJ’s eyes, a world where people of any color can govern the nation. And I realize that no matter what happens in Obama’s presidency, which will certainly be less charmed than his candidacy, the watershed moment has already happened. My son is growing up in a world I will never quite be able to know. And I couldn’t be happier about it.