I remember being in undergraduate classes back when Fukuyama was still being taken seriously and feeling a sort of depression that history appeared at an end even as I was just starting to get my sea legs in the actual lived world. All the progress there was to be had seemed, to me at the time, to have been made. All the great leaders had come and gone. I regretted that I had missed, among others, the Salt March, the “I Have a Dream Speech,” the Blitz, the Depression, the Cultural Revolution, the Kent State massacre. I thought, from all the books and the primary sources and the movie-watching, that one thing about all these times seemed most true: people were alive then. Things mattered.
You all know the end of that story. About seven years ago, the world came to a sudden and rather terrible agreement that there were probably some things that were, actually, good. There were also, as a consequence, bad things. The best you could do, we all concluded for a day or two, maybe for a week, was reach a hand out to the person next door and hope none of the frail little life you built would come crashing down around your ears because someone flew a plane into it for no reason at all. However squandered that cultural moment later became, it was worth something because all the old gears of time started, albeit creakily, to turn again.
And so by some strange stroke of luck I am writing this from my adopted hometown – that it was home never became apparent until I came here for a day to interview for the job I now have – and an adopted country that, whatever its faults, stands today to maybe, knock-wood, I-don’t-want-to-jinx-this, but altogether probably will elect its first black President. If it doesn’t, it will come damn close, anyway.
When I go back “home,” which isn’t often anymore for the same reason I felt compelled to use those scare quotes, people often ask me why I live in America. Things seem so bad here, from the outside. There’s no health care and there are people starving in the streets and don’t even get me started on that Fred Phelps character, people say. When I was coming to New York to live for the first time, some people warned me not “to say anything bad about Bush.”
Of course, some of why I am here is just New York. Enough said.
But the rest of it? I always liked America, because with great power comes also great possibility, to riff off of Spiderman. Because they drink their own Kool-Aid here and every once in awhile it’s nice to live among people who actually, literally and totally, believe in freedom. Sometimes this leads them off the cliff, of course, but it can also pull a very heavy load up a very steep hill every once in awhile, and in my book that is something worth celebrating.
If things go the way everybody I know hopes tomorrow, if all the long lines and whatever shenanigans anyone gets up to doesn’t de-legitimize the result, I feel as though I can go home, the next time, triumphant. A few foreigners I know in the last couple of days have confessed how suddenly a jealousy has washed over them – just for tomorrow, and the next day, they’d maybe like to be American. They’d like to feel at the vanguard of something too, even if the feeling is only a fleeting one. And it’s not the Salt March, and Obama, for all his strengths, is no Dr. King. But for tomorrow, and maybe if we’re lucky, for the rest of the week, I’ll get to be in the midst of people feeling like they took a step forward. And if that’s the best I get to wash off that old undergrad feeling of having missed out on the best of this world, I’ll take it.
