Obama is Our President; Joe Biden is Our Story

This picture was taken last summer of (from left to right) my BFF and colleague Kathleen Bergin, a Turkish student at Bahcesehir University, and me. I love Kathy. I love Turkey. I love Bahcesehir University. I love Obama. So this picture makes me really happy. If this picture also included my family and a big block of cheese, it would pretty much be perfect.

I can't sleep tonight. The whole world changes in 8 1/2 hours. Tomorrow is going to be that scene in the Wizard of Oz when we switch from Kansas to Oz and everything goes from black-and-white to technicolor. Tomorrow is technicolor.

I watched the concert at the Lincoln Memorial on HBO yesterday. I watched Oprah from the Kennedy Center today. I'll watch the Inauguration from school tomorrow. I'll sing and jump up and down and wave at everyone on TV just like I did when I watched HBO and Oprah. And then I'll order the soundtrack. No foolin', this Inauguration comes with a soundtrack. Again, add a block of cheese, and I'd marry this Inauguration.

It's a big day for a lot of people tomorrow. Americans, sure. But it's more than that to a lot of people. African-Americans, obviously, but I can't even imagine what that's like. But I do know what it's like for a generation that's been uninspired by anything. Until now, no one's even tried to inspire us. I wondered what it would be like when one of our own was in the White House. Frankly, I thought it would be bad (and it may still . . . there are a lot of elections between now and the time Xers fade into the background). This Obama character, though, knows what he's doing. Scoop up all the people who were considered uninterested in the national conversation and tell us that it's our turn, and you can ride that horse for a long, long time. Count me in. I am jaded, jaded, jaded, and he's convinced me.

I thought America was over. Seriously. I thought the good part was long, long gone. I listened to my parents talk ad nauseum about how sad it was when John F. Kennedy was shot. Everybody remembered where they were. Great. The only reason that anyone in my generation remembers where they were when anything happened is because we're trying to manufacture some equivalent "where were you when . . .?" moment to the one Boomers have with JFK. (And 9/11 was the Millennial moment, not ours. We had the shuttle crash, but really? It was sad . . . sure. But it was no presidential assassination or mass terrorist attack on U.S. soil.) It's not that we wanted a tragic moment. We wanted to care about something uniquely American so much that it would break our hearts if it was taken away. "Better to have loved and lost" etc., etc., etc.

I remember the precise moment when I believed that America was over. It was the admonition that terrorists hate shopping more than anything in the world. If you want to really piss off a terrorist, go shopping! That was the day I logged onto the State Department site to find out how to get my Canadian work visa.

Then, of course, there was Katrina. I already knew America was over, but I was in a ridiculous amount of denial about what a shabby state we were in when the progress stopped. I saw a lot of disgusting apathy in the weeks after Katrina. But the thing that changed me -- I mean, *really* changed -- was when I realized that all the critical race theorists are right: It's interest convergence that changes people's behavior. Not the desire to do good. Not an innate sense of what's right and what's wrong. I haven't talked about that moment since it happened, but I think about it a lot. And it still makes me nauseous. Bergin and I told Houston police at the Astrodome that there was a set of unlocked doors leading down a series of unmonitored rooms and hallways. We went in one night to see what was in there. It had old office furniture in it and had probably once been an office suite, adjacent to a maze of hallways. People had clearly already been there since the Astrodome was opened as a shelter. Someone had urinated on the floor. Someone had shit in a trash can. There were soiled clothes tossed in different places. Bergin and I thought, "Wow! What a spectacularly good place to rape someone!" We told the police that part, too. The first night, the cop we told shrugged. The next night, the cop we told shrugged. So we went in the third night with a camera and took pictures. We posted them on our blog and reported that we'd told the police that bad things were going to happen in there, but they seemed pretty cool about the whole thing. We started referring to it as The Rape & Torture Suite. The next day, they were tied shut. "Now?!" I screamed, when I saw it. "You won't lock the doors to keep someone vulnerable from being secreted away and brutalized, but you'll lock them to keep your department from being embarrassed?" Why not? Brownie was doing a heckofajob and all was right with the world. I tried to sell my husband on the idea of moving to Turkey. We compromised and came to New York instead.

And you know what this makes me think of? Jill Biden.

Everytime I see Joe Biden, I can't help thinking of what it must have been like to lose a wife and child as a young man. He must have thought nothing was ever going to feel right again. Surely, he thought the good part was behind him. There must have been days when he thought *he* was over. And then came Jill. I bet he dared not hope that she might usher in a season of new happiness. But eventually, he clearly did believe that. And suddenly, his best days were ahead, not behind.

That's us now. Suddenly, our best days are ahead.

"Sweet land of liberty/Of thee I sing." 7 hours and 45 minutes. :)