Try Not to Breathe

I'm trying to enjoy our victory yesterday. And I do mean our. If you're too stupid to realize Obama's win is the best possible outcome for this world, that doesn't mean you won't reap the benefits. You will--oh, you will.

I want to leap and shout with all those beautiful young people whose enthusiasm and dedication to their belief in a better world helped to bring that world about. We've said they're selfish and lazy and don't care about politics or participating in real--versus virtual--communities, but we were wrong, dead wrong.

That a descendant of slave owners would one day be giving the ole rebel yell in honor of the United States--that's right, the Union--electing its first black president would surely have been far from the wildest imaginings of those very slave owners. And it makes me yowl even louder inside to think about it.

But there are a couple of storm clouds hovering over this Inaugural Parade route in my head. The first is the fact that I'm holding my breath hoping that the worst, the unthinkable, the unutterable, will not happen. I'm enough of a cynic to know that it could. And superstitious enough not to say it aloud.

The other little cloud is the vineyard where the sour grapes of wrath are stored. For example, one co-worker was so distraught at the prospect of a President Obama that she didn't sleep last night. She showed up at work wearing black and looking like something that was dragged for miles by a pickup truck in Texas, sighing and shaking her head all day as though we were facing the Apocalypse. I suppose I should feel sorry for her in her ignorance and fear--she's actually terrified that she'll lose her job and her house, perhaps through the nefarious plans of our president-elect to give them to, let's say, a crack ho. She called the Democrats in the office "comrades." She said she was going to wear black every day for the next four years. (Sounds like my college wardrobe.) Then--the unforgivable, the unconscionable--she said to a friend, a Jew, that she hoped that friend would "visit her in the concentration camp."

I'm going to try to give this alarmist drama queen a break. But her hot, foul breath, mingling with the fetid expirations of all those who think like her, is causing a miasma that threatens to choke me. So I'll try not to breathe.