From Cake to Chaos

A year ago we made a cake with a big 44 in the middle surrounded by Obama in blue letters. Our playgroup met at our house to watch the event on a bunny-eared TV (once we took our places we couldn't move or the reception went out). I realized maybe I should have been alone, or just with Ryan and the boys, when I watched. I thought I had had my moment of emotional release in Grant Park on election night when Ryan and I and many thousands of others watched the numbers roll in on the jumbotrons. I remember a collective sigh -- the one that comes before you cry -- among the crowd at the announcement. We watched in relief, amazement and humility as something benign as numbers on a screen showed that the world would wake up a new place. How this new world would work itself out nobody new. But Obama stood for change and we were hungry for that.

We walked home from the Garfield red line station with about 50 other people all headed toward the island of Hyde Park. There were a hundred more still waiting at the bus stop, and no buses in sight. There was a fast moving parade of cars with passengers hooting out the windows. People lining the few businesses we passed gave us waves and high fives. Shouts of "Obama!" scattered through the cool midnight air. I felt I was trespassing on a part of the city I knew little about, save from newspaper reports. Somehow, now that Obama would be our president, it was okay to be there -- at least for one night. We would return to our own places but for a brief moment there was some kind of unity, although it is a shattered one at best.

Long before midnight last night we learned that the party in which Obama stands is not getting a standing ovation. Some have called it a "referendum" on his presidency. But what else could we expect? Obama is tirelessly pursuing an agenda no other president has had to face and making unpopular decisions now so that future generations need not suffer another decade of wait and see politics. Perhaps if we worked more on unshattering our deeply divided lives we would have more to build our political process upon on and less to fight about. Not that the Obama administration is in chaos, but the political process, in DC at least, seems to be a bit chaotic one year after we welcomed Barack Obama and his family into the White House.