Proud to be American once again (i hope Obama is the black JFK)

[Guest guest]

Proud to be American once again

 

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

 

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November 3, 2008 at 11:36 PM EST

 

I don't know what kind of president Barack Obama will be, but I know

this: He has made me proud of America again. And also of Americans.

 

Today, they are turning out in record numbers to repudiate the

leaders who disgraced and failed them. Today, they're doing what no

one would have dared imagine a few years ago: electing a biracial

president with a foreign-sounding name who self-identifies as black.

They are taking a courageous leap of faith, because they're disgusted

with what's happened to their country.

 

I am a Canadian who was born and grew up in the United States. For

most people like me, the past few years have been dreadful. We lost

our native country to men without honour. We lost it to people who

authorized torture, secret prisons and indefinite detention. We lost

it to people who made America hated and feared around the world and

then, for good measure, presided over a global financial collapse. We

gave up trying to defend America to all those critics who love to

wallow in its wickedness - because, for once, they were right, and we

were ashamed.

 

I don't know how Mr. Obama will do as president, but I know this: He

will give Americans their country back. He will work to make it the

kind of country that people can respect again.

 

I come from a long line of corn-fed Midwesterners, Republicans,

mostly. They were an optimistic lot, and they were immensely proud of

their country. From the time I was little, I, too, knew that my

country stood for freedom, justice and doing the right thing.

 

That idealized nation never did exist, of course. When Mr. Obama's

parents got married in Hawaii, it was still illegal for them to do so

in Virginia. Eventually, I learned that America wasn't always just,

and that quite a few Americans lived in a country quite different

from the one I knew. By the time I settled in Canada, I was relieved

to leave behind the race wars, the wounds of Vietnam and the operatic

hysteria of Watergate.

 

I've been a citizen of Canada for 30 years, and I never think of

going back. But it's been painful to see my native land turn into a

place that would dismay my grandparents. The moderate Rockefeller

Republicans of my youth were banished long ago, replaced by a gang of

moral absolutists who derive their certainty on both abortion and

foreign wars from divine revelation. They weren't conservatives at

all. They were radicals, who practised a sort of ideological slash

and burn. They created tribal divisions so bitter that, today,

Republicans and Democrats can scarcely talk to one another.

 

The optimism of my grandparents disappeared, too. Seven years after

9/11, America is still behaving like a nation under imminent threat -

defensive, inward-looking and overly afraid. There are smarter ways

to fight the terror wars, with less apocalyptic rhetoric, more

confidence and less pointless harassment of the public in airports.

Maybe Mr. Obama will find them.

 

I'm proud, too, proud and profoundly moved, that black Americans who

haven't bothered to vote in years are voting today. I see them and I

cry. The racial conversation will never end, but it will be

different. The bitter narrative of oppression and grievance is over.

The narrative of possibility - of Martin Luther King - can begin

again.

 

I'm under no illusion that Americans will start holding hands

tomorrow and sing Kumbaya. I have no idea whether Barack Obama will

be able to succeed, or even muddle through, with the nasty hand he's

been dealt. But I do know that what's happening today is a fresh

start, and a relief, and even redemptive.

 

" The cradle of the best and the worst. " That's what Leonard Cohen

sings about America and, as usual, he's absolutely right. So,

tonight, please join me in raising a glass to democracy in the United

States. Americans are about to get their country back, and so am I.

 

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail