I'VE BEEN SICK the past few days, and am finally feeling conscious again, emerging from the fog of illness to the bright hope of inauguration week.
I watched the celebration on the mall yesterday, and came away with two connections that I had not made before about the mood of the country and the coming administration.
The first was that the nation had finally owned the hope of the sixties. Here we are, nearly half a century away, and yet the seeds of this week were sown back then, when I was in high school and college.
The Clinton years were a respite from the repression and regression of the Reagan era, but the spirit was somehow subdued even then, and there was definitely a sense that it was under siege.
I don't have that sense now, and I hope I'm right not to. I find myself doubting that covert racism will hold much political sway again, or that basic human rights will be under siege soon—not because I think the new administration is superhuman, but because I feel that the country has turned a corner.
The people will not put up with it anymore. Obama can count on the nation to hold him accountable, to fulfill his promises both explicit and implied. He won't have an uphill battle on every moral front.
And that's the other impression—the country, as a whole, seems to have turned a spiritual corner. We've turned our backs on authoritarianism as a world-view, rejected the idea that the U.S. is king of the world and that the president is king of the U.S.
A lot of things go out of the window with that notion: the idea that government should be meddling in people's personal lives (telling us what to read, what to think, who we can marry), the idea that a minority, or even a majority, should be allowed to use government to dictate their moral views to the rest of us, the idea that government should operate, either at home or abroad, primarily through coercion.
We've recovered our country, and in the process, ourselves.
At least, that's what I hope today.
