Regarding Hope

For the past few weeks, my life was mostly on hold. No, I wasn’t working nonstop on the campaign, although I made a few calls and knocked on a few doors. No, I wasn’t ill or incapacitated. I was waiting for Tuesday, for the decision that became clear at about 9 pm PST.

Obviously, it was a vital moment for our country, our world, and our generation. It was a glorious moment for African-American history, civil rights, and the Democratic party.

For me and many, many of my friends (Facebook, Twitter, and tangible included), it was also deeply personal. We have grown up defined by accessibility, irony, and apathy. We’ve known too much (thanks to the internet) and been able to do too little (despite the internet). As a defense, we became cynical, vaguely hopeless. We (by which I mean “I”) stopped watching the real news or listening to the real radio, only able to swallow the doses that came with healthy doses of sarcasm: The Daily Show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart’s pained earnestness was the closest we let ourselves come to caring. We had to laugh, because otherwise we weren’t sure we’d be able to stop crying. People my age remember 2000 and were old enough to vote in 2004, but we’d never really met a politician who gave us any indication–letting aside “hope” for now–that it might someday be safe to openly care again.

The narrative of how Obama made that possible is old hat by now, but I’d like to underscore the rhetorical effect of his victory on Tuesday. When PA and NH were called…when OH went blue…when the numbers became decisive…when the West coast polls closed and the networks confidently projected the winner…when McCain gave his gracious concession speech and I called my friend Sarah who was standing in Grant Park praying, I sat down on the steps of the bar where I was watching, and I sobbed unashamedly by myself. Barack Obama’s election said to me–and, I suspect, to many of my friends–that $5 donations and our few hours of phone calling were worth something. His election communicated that good thinking and genuine earnestness could actually win out over cynical divisiveness. His victory indicated that incompetence could have negative consequences and competence might be rewarded.

Even better, though, his speech challenged us to try to sustain something that still feels new and a little stiff: caring. In his somber, realistic speech, he made clear that hope is a serious business. He made clear that we aren’t done; all those small things we did to get him elected weren’t enough, because when you actually care about the world, nothing is ever enough. His exhaustion and sobriety asked us for exhaustion and sobriety; his attention to the work ahead asked us to attend to our work, as well.

No, we can’t would have let us off the hook. We all could have gone back to our cynical, ironic selves (though I hope we wouldn’t have). Yes, we can means we’re still on the hook. When he asked that crowd at Grant Park, as well as many of us in bars and homes across the country, to repeat his creed, he implicated us. He didn’t just mean “Yes, I can.” He meant “Hey, you better.”