Nov. 5, 2008 (World News Trust) -- Maybe we were just behind schedule. Could it be that we simply got a late start launching the REAL New American Century?
There is an argument to be made that THIS, NOW, is the new and more
formal start to the 21st Century, or perhaps it will be, come Jan.
20th, 2009. Just a little under a decade late. I always felt that
crossing that proverbial Millennium Bridge from the 20th to the 21st
Centuries was going to bring us to a whole new world as well as a new
era. Perhaps it’s just that we got distracted, fell off the roadway and
got lost, and took an eight-year detour through the weeds.
The new millennium (as most conventionally marked it, almost eight
years ago) SHOULD have started with a bang as big as this one. Instead
we limped into it, at the end of 2000, with a presidential campaign
whose conclusion was questionable and murky as Hell. It was a campaign
that was anything but decisive and one that will forever be suspect,
scarred with an asterisk in the books. That shadow has stalked us for
what will wind up being eight long and rather anguished years -- a
period that felt unreal, unbelievable, almost like a hostage hold. If
anything, it was a misfire. A false start.
And to quote a fellow who caught our attention and set much of our collective imagination on fire, “not this time.”
All day long, throughout Election Day 2008, things felt different. As
one of our friends said at the Election Night party we threw, the
previous night felt a little like Christmas Eve -- the Christmas Eve we
middle-agers remembered from our childhood, when the excitement and
sense of hopeful expectation threatened to keep us up, buzzing and
electric with anticipation, long past the time when Santa was supposed
to have slipped stealthily down the chimney.
My daughter’s absentee ballot arrived from her distant college campus.
She’d Fed-Ex’ed it priority-overnight, for us to sign and hand-carry
over to our neighborhood polling place. We took pictures. And we
brought home an “I Voted” sticker to stick on her picture that sits on
the mantle above the living room fireplace. We held our breath all day,
fairly obsessed with the wonderment - can we dare to hope for a big
celebration? Might we actually win this one? Free and clear, and
uncontestable even? As a tall, eloquent, still-young Chicagoan along
the trail boldly declared, many, many months ago -- “yes we can.”
And we did.
And after all the angst and the gnawing of fingernails and cuticles,
the sleepless nights, the verbal blows and insults from other corners,
and fears of replays of recent Election Night treachery, I guess I
finally felt like ringing in a new year, and yes, a new century. I
actually felt like throwing off my caution and hesitation and daring to
have some fun even while fighting superstition that I myself might wind
up jinxing the whole thing.
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We stuck “HOPE” posters up on the walls. We scattered random campaign
buttons across the buffet table. We set out cans of Arizona Ice Tea,
whipped up Delaware seafood dip for a platter of Maui potato chips. We
picked up sweet potato pie and paired it with Vermont maple sugar to
sprinkle on top if desired -- my own personal homage to Howard Dean and
his successful 50-State Strategy (my heart STILL belongs to “Hollerin’
Howard). We procured half-a-dozen Chicago deep-dish pizzas – one of
them Hawaiian, to serve with a colorful array of fresh and dried
pineapple and papaya chunks. The piece-de-resistance was a luscious
rounded chocolate mousse (moose) cake carefully field-dressed and
adorned with meticulously hand-crafted pipe cleaner antlers. That
earned great, relieved giggles as friends arrived, and decided not to
wait to exhale after all. It was time to celebrate and to quench an
eight-year thirst, and feel hopeful as we watched the returns come in. It had been a long, painful, and heart-breaking drought.
By the end of the evening, grocery bags of tear-bloated Kleenex dotted
the room. We screamed, cried, hooted, hugged, clapped, jumped up and
down, and cried and hugged some more. We were half a country away from
Grant Park in Chicago, where the faces of Jesse Jackson and Oprah were
just another two Americans spotted in among a near quarter-million
weeping, cheering, roaring citizens in the crowd. It had been so long –
SO long since we felt happy like this, SO long since we felt like we’d
actually been heard, SO long since we felt included, SO long since we
felt like WE actually mattered. This one couldn’t be spun, smeared, or
stolen. Not this time.
Those old ways no longer worked, nor did they matter anymore. We
finally arrived at the portal of a truly, definitively new century. A
page had indeed been turned. One chapter had been finished and a
genuinely new one had begun -- and rather decisively, too. Chapter?
Perhaps beyond even that. Possibly an entire new book was now opening
up before us all. The hope of newness and change and an undeniable
shift in direction and priorities carried us as a nation over an
historic threshold. On this morning after, we are not the same as we
were. Not anymore. It’s this earth-shaking episode in America’s story
that’s bigger and more momentous than any one thing, or any one of us.
MANY of us who’d felt shut out, ignored, neglected, mocked, and even
demonized, were finally heard, and finally saw ourselves counted in and
represented, too -- regardless what color we are or whichever political
way we lean.
We now have an actual, tangible chance at a new beginning. Seems like
everyone recognizes it, across the country and around the world. Even
many of the oppositional pundits agree on this one. The REAL “New
American Century” has finally begun. And it’s some project we now have
on our hands, alright. The Obama rout on Nov. 4th, 2008, has made
that clear. We are different, renewed, maybe even redeemed. A big
enough evolution that it perhaps required almost a decade longer than
anyone expected to lift it off the launching pad. We can hopefully now
move beyond the last eight mistaken and aberrant years when something
weird just came over us and we were not ourselves. Our better angels
finally got here, and found us, and we look like America again -- an
America where WE ALL are numbered among those “real, patriotic
Americans” that some of our opponents could see only in small, narrow,
resentful, fearful, judgmental, divisive, and politically-segregated pockets of geography AND of mindset.
We are ALL new and improved, in a different time and place than even
just a day or so before. New Year’s Day came early this time, even if
the new American millennium came eight years late.
Now we can all hit the Reset button -- and roll up our sleeves, and
begin again, revitalized, and renewed. We get to make a fresh start
now, and usher in a new, reinvigorated and redefined era. There’s a lot
of work to do. At long last, the real 21st Century for America to lead
is about to begin.
***
Mary Lyon is a veteran broadcaster and five-time Golden Mike Award winner, who has anchored, reported, and written for the Associated Press Radio Network, NBC Radio "The Source," and many Los Angeles-area stations including KRTH-FM/AM, KLOS-FM, KFWB-AM, and KTLA-TV, and occasional media analyst for ABC Radio News. She began her career as a liberal activist with the Student Coalition for Humphrey/Muskie in 1968, and helped spearhead a regional campaign, The Power 18," to win the right to vote for 18-year-olds. She remains an advocate for liberal causes, responsibility and accountability in media, environmental education and support of the arts for children, and green living. In addition to World News Trust, Mary writes for Huffington Post, OpEdNews, Democrats.us, WeDemocrats.org's "We! The People" webzine. Mary is also a parenting expert, having written and llustrated the book "The Frazzled Working Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood.