Spring Break
Final Thoughts on the Election
Alex Rosenfeld (OH), Contributing Writer
Issue date: 11/10/08 Section: News
It just so happened that I woke up and turned on the television right as CNN was calling the election for Obama. Watching good old Wolf Blitzer deliver the news, I unexpectedly found myself overcome by tears. "Are you crying?" my mom asked, a bit in disbelief, when she called me a few minutes later. It was not until I was watching Obama's speech at Grant Park that I realized what had overtaken me. This election means different things to different people, and I can hardly compare the significance of this victory for me to the significance of this victory for African Americans and others who have fought so long, so hard to reach this day. Nevertheless, at the moment those historic words, "Barack Obama Elected President," came on the screen, I had found myself wholly sentient of the accumulated frustrations and shame of the past eight years. My tears were a response to the overwhelming sweetness of being finally set free from this era of pessimism and despair.
My generation is one hopelessly stricken by cynicism. We came of voting age at a time when our government was stalled and our president persecuted for a transgression so irrelevant to politics as to be comical. (To this day, I am dumbfounded that a president can be impeached for lying about a blowjob while his successor goes unscathed for a grand fabrication that has led to the deaths of 4,500 soldiers and 90,000 civilians). Not more than two years later, we casted our first votes in a presidential election, only to see a majority of our country disenfranchised in a process that exposed the absurdities of our electoral system. (And to think that we would soon after initiate a war on the premise of spreading democracy when we had so notably failed to execute it in our own country). I will let history be the judge of the failure of leadership in the eight years that followed - the disastrous environmental policies, the steps backward in education and healthcare reform, a misbegotten and misguided war, and most recently the crippling economic crisis. I'll only say that it shouldn't come as a surprise that our generation has been one of the most cynical and, until recently, apolitical generations of the modern era.
My generation is one hopelessly stricken by cynicism. We came of voting age at a time when our government was stalled and our president persecuted for a transgression so irrelevant to politics as to be comical. (To this day, I am dumbfounded that a president can be impeached for lying about a blowjob while his successor goes unscathed for a grand fabrication that has led to the deaths of 4,500 soldiers and 90,000 civilians). Not more than two years later, we casted our first votes in a presidential election, only to see a majority of our country disenfranchised in a process that exposed the absurdities of our electoral system. (And to think that we would soon after initiate a war on the premise of spreading democracy when we had so notably failed to execute it in our own country). I will let history be the judge of the failure of leadership in the eight years that followed - the disastrous environmental policies, the steps backward in education and healthcare reform, a misbegotten and misguided war, and most recently the crippling economic crisis. I'll only say that it shouldn't come as a surprise that our generation has been one of the most cynical and, until recently, apolitical generations of the modern era.
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