2008-11-05»
hopefullyยปI was walking down Precita when the news came out that Obama had won. I could tell because, on the stroke of 8PM, San Francisco was cheering and beeping and honking. I popped into my corner shop, which has had a large Obama Hope poster on its door for months now. There was a couple in front of me that couldn’t care less, just running off to find a party. I bought a celebratory apple cider and a Snickers bar. Go, me.
I went up to my room, on my own, and watched the concession and acceptance speechs in amazing low-bandwidth-artifact-o-vision. I stayed in a chatroom with all of my British friends, who, for once, were envious of me being in America. I missed my daughter a little, who is in New England, hopefully storing all of this somewhere.
I remembered sitting here watching Obama’s nomination speech a million years ago, and then going to sleep cautiously hopeful, and waking up to it being forgotten and all the talk being Palin, Palin, Palin.
I ran around the tight little loops I’ve been running around since before January – the rosary of political websites that I touch once, then move on. Outside, San Francisco partied as wild as San Francisco can. You really didn’t want to be at Valencia and 19th tonight unless you planned to be very happy indeed.
In the Castro, they said, things were more bittersweet. Prop 8 was gaining, which meant gay marriage was losing. I watched the percentages on that stay solidly in favour of ripping an act of love away from my friends. Hit reload a few times to try and make it better (that’s how we fix things on the Internet: reload!). Watched the usual election craziness sit in the corner of the night where it could little harm: Georgia losing two million votes somewhere. Al Franken facing a comedy of recounts. North Carolina stuck on the edge of an Obama victory for hours.
I downloaded Obama’s victory speech in HD, using BitTorrent, a mechanism that like Presidents relies on thousands of others having the same idea at the same time. The President-Elect seemed serious: when Biden came out smiling, he just looked at him, like the most serious kid in the world, like someone whose grandmother had just died and left him a lonely rickety old house to live in.
They said he told them to cancel the fireworks. Outside, America already disobeys their new President.