Tensegrities

Bummer!

Everyone keeps asking me if I’m happy. I’m not sure happy is the right word? I am deeply relieved, in some inner corner of my heart, that perhaps I can still believe in the process, believe in my country. But the struggles in front of us are no less daunting than they were a day ago — I just have a little bit more hope that change is possible.

YES WE CAN. So now we must.

I think joy might be a better word, because joy is usually also mixed with grief and pain. I think I’m feeling really fragile, actually, because I did not really believe that Obama could win. So I was working and working and working on the campaign knowing somehow that it was good work for the long haul. But now he’s won! So I have to actually let a little bit of hope into my heart and think about what else might be possible…

UPDATE: Eric nails it for me. This is how I feel.

However you like…

(I copied this shamelessly from Eric!)

Eric made me aware of 538, a blog where Nate Silver explains polls, and now he’s pointed to Nate Silver’s piece in Newsweek, which points out important things to look for at different times tomorrow night as various polls close.

What a hard thing, on the last day of this campaign.

Here’s info on where to call to report anything you think is problematic.

I wish I could have been there. This song is a perfect soundtrack for where we are right now with the election. It’s powerful, haunting, and in no way celebratory. (Hat tip to Eric for pointing to it)

The Boss singing about Youngstown, Ohio from Rick Pollack on Vimeo.

I’ve followed Andrew Sullivan’s blog more in the past year than ever before, and I’ve often linked to it. Here is a long form essay he just published in the Times of London. It captures some of my own feelings — the apprehension and the excitement — as we enter these final days.

Among the most enthusiastic Obama supporters, there are tinges of hero worship and aspirations beyond anything any human being can deliver. And the hostility born of dashed expectations is always the worst. People expecting a messiah will at some point be forced to realise they have merely elected a president.

No president will be able to wave the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan away with some kind of magic wand – there are few good options in either conflict, and many potential perils. No president will be able to end a recession with deep roots or alter market confidence in a single speech.

No president can change the Earth’s climate in four or eight years. And when Obama’s limitations emerge, as they will, there is a danger that the powerful expectations of his young base may turn to tears. This is always the risk with political “movements”. They conjure up utopias that can simply never happen.

Between the roiling and increasingly bitter rapids on the right and the left, can Obama maintain a steady course? We cannot know, of course. But the evidence of the past year is encouraging. What has been truly amazing is the preternatural calm and moderation Obama has shown throughout this volatile and emotional campaign. He has managed to get to the brink of the White House by beating some of the most formidable political machines in America – the Clintons and the Roves – without intensifying the conflict or polarising the country himself.

and

In the coming week, if he is elected, we would be wise to resist euphoria or sentiment. But we would be wilfully blind not to sense the gravity and potential of the moment as well. We could have the first black president, with a congressional majority of a size not seen since Lyndon Johnson. We could see a landslide among the young. We could see an unprecedented African-American turnout – a moment when black Americans actively take ownership for the first time of the society in which they have always been such an integral part.

We simply do not know what new realities this moment could unleash. What we do know is that this is history – epic, deep, momentous history.

Let us keep our heads. But let us not numb our hearts. Somewhere in a Burkean idyll, countless Americans who lived before us, the souls of so many black folk and white folk across the centuries, are watching. What would Washington have said? How could Lincoln believe it? How amazed would Martin Luther King be?

We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election. This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely mixed-race figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation reimagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least.

As they have learnt to say in some of the most blighted parts of the world at some of the most desperate times: know hope.

A very useful short video from the Obama campaign (hat tip to dailyKos)

Two days of door knocking down, two to go. The contrasts were sharp for us this weekend. On Saturday our family was sent off to a neighborhood in St. Paul that includes part of historic Summit Avenue. The streets whose doors we were knocking on included some really large and grand old homes, with beautifully landscaped front lawns, and carefully kept side and backyards.

Today we were in east St. Paul, near Prosperity Heights. I can’t say that I had as heart warming an experience as this canvasser, but it was pretty fun and even energizing to be walking up to houses I probably would not ordinarily have any reason to go near — these were ramshackle, often crumbling small homes, surrounded by other homes for sale up and down the block — and having people smile once they cracked their door open far enough to hear why I was there. This was a very diverse neighborhood, and several times there were young children translating for their elders who clearly couldn’t speak English. We were doing a “reverse door knock” — which meant that we were skipping any homes which had been identified as McCain voters — so almost everyone I talked with was excited about Obama and eager to vote.

I’ve been full of anxiety the last couple days, as the election draws near. Being out in the fall sunshine, doing something useful, really helped me calm down. Try it, you’ll like it!