(no subject)

[proximoception]

The only reservation I ever had about Barack Obama was the one pretty much everyone had: will everyone else vote for him? This year has been immensely frightening and entertaining that way, watching people shift around based on that--they will? are they doing it? will we do this? for serious? but enough though? There's something absolutely beautiful about that kind of melting of incredulity into euphoria. Because, stupid as it sounds, and don't tell me you haven't felt this, it makes you trust people, entertain the idea of trusting people again, of belonging to them. It thaws the ice, the awful black killing ice of these times.

And I will be voting, despite my absolute, math-backed disbelief in the efficacy of individual votes at this level and my profound ambivalence at a system based on duping people into believing in that efficacy, for him. Among my people, and for him personally, because I am grateful to them and to him. He is the best candidate any of us will see in our lifetimes, and everything I'm capable of reading in him points to his being the best president as well. His compromises are the necessary ones--not making them and therefore not winning would be a different and murderously, literally murderously worse compromise. He is not the lesser of two evils, he is the greatest of all available goods, and a good so good it makes me grateful, grateful to know it exists--that it can exist even there where he'll be. I will never meet him, but he has my vote, finally, out of friendship.

Comments

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I'm not gonna let you forget you were once a faithless Edwards supporter.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Only for the reason given in sentence #1. Which plugs into the trust issue--put up the schmucky southern used car salesman white guy, people might actually vote for him, was my line of thought. He did talk about poor people more, which was cool, but he could afford to, he was the white guy. And then Obama and Hillary happened and that was terrifying and amazing and then the better of those two went on, and that was stranger still. My attitude toward Obama in January was "Yes, you would--but I don't believe you can."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

And I know you remember I mostly touted the electability of his hair.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

+ his warm, comfortable, electable drawl

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I did not say that. Also: blech.