This blog will return to its writing-and-life-in-general focus any day now, but the past two days I’ve been just wandering around in a happy post-election haze, surfing the net, reading lj, checking friends’ facebook statuses, and generally getting nothing at all done.
stormywriter on what electing Obama means to someone who’s grown up under the Bush administration: I had a thread of quiet certainty that the world I lived in would be worse than the one my parents lived in, and that my children would inherit an even worse world. It was not despair; I had never known anything else, so how could it be crushing? I shrugged and let it go, never knowing that there could be something else.
tammypierce on has never been so happy to be proven wrong: Up until yesterday I would have sworn that America wasn’t ready to elect a black man as president. I wanted him to be president, and I contributed as much as I could to his campaign, but in my heart, I didn’t think the rest of the country was going to look past the color of his skin … Yesterday was one of those days when, in years to come, people will ask you what you did, and how did you feel. And your memories will be so much better than our last such day, September 11, 2001.
jenlibrarian on looking around her school post-election: finally. here is someone for you, kids.
katemessner shared day-after-the-election headlines and front pages from around the world with her students: … my favorite classroom conversation started when the kids checked out a newspaper from Barcelona. On the front page was an image of an African American man, but it wasn’t Barack Obama. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. We talked about the Civil Rights Movement as a long, long road and noted that even MLK might not have imagined the scene in Chicago’s Grant Park. One of the girls at the front table nodded, looking up at the image of King on the screen and said quietly, “It was like he was there last night, too.”
fjm on why it’s been far longer than 40 years from oppression to the presidency: The Civil Rights Movement did not start in 1955. That’s just when masses of white folks started to take notice.
penknife on how we have to address the concerns folks have about gay marriage: The fact that a marriage with traditional gender roles isn’t the only option doesn’t make it not an option. But accepting that means accepting that there are multiple ways of doing marriage right, and I think that’s really hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. There’s a lot of work to do here. It means having some hard conversations with voters, and I think we haven’t yet figured out the best messages to reach them on these points … We’ve got to keep trying.