Obama wasn’t my candidate. McCain wasn’t either, but he had my vote because his ideology and values are closer to my own and I believed he would do a better job of leading this nation. But now Barack Obama is my president (elect) and while there is disappointment and concern. I am also intensely moved by the significance of his election.

It struck me most profoundly when I heard a radio reporter mention watching Jesse Jackson weeping on television (as a TV-free zone I rely on radio for real-time descriptions of events). It’s powerful for me that we have elected a self-identified black man to the highest office in the land – but I’m a middle-aged white woman who grew up in a racially diverse part of Los Angeles and the truth is, I have no idea what full-on racial prejudice feels like.

So hearing this reporter describe with a sense of awe that Jesse Jackson wept continually, wept like a young child, I realized how extraordinary this election is for the black community– something they felt was out of their reach as a race has been grasped resoundingly, and not only by blacks but by all races. The Presidency is not a referendum on race but Obama’s win required the support of myriads of white voters – and I hope that fact serves as a balm to the weary and torn souls who’ve been encouraged to view all of life through the lens of racism.

I pray that Obama will be a great and wise President; I pray that he is not a man of the Chicago machine but proves to be his own man and a man with a true heart for the Lord.

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The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; He directs it like a watercourse wherever He pleases. Proverbs 21:1

When I indulge my indolent self, I accomplish much less than when I deliver a pep-talk to my go-getter self– it’s kind of the “two dogs at war within me” scenario.*

Being a television-free zone, I haven’t been over-exposed to television ads or last night’s Obama infomercial (caveat emptor: there is no money-back guarantee on this purchase and no ‘do-over.’ Bearing that in mind I’ve been fascinated by Obama’s strong encouragement that people vote early instead of waiting until Election Day; it sounds so much like, “Vote for me now before you learn something that might change your mind–”) but I’ve heard several references to Obama sharing his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in elementary school and his apparent comparison of that experience with his desire to redistribute wealth or, in his own words, “spread the wealth around.”

I don’t think so.

In fact, children sharing and trading lunches and sandwiches in elementary school is much more a ‘free market’ economy than a government redistribution economy. Remember? How often could you trade your liverwurst sandwich to another kid? I liked liverwurst but even I didn’t want someone else’s liverwurst sandwich; I liked the way my mom made them.

What Obama wants is for the teacher to collect all the lunches, pick out her favorite things, and then hand them back out the way she sees fit, so that it’s ‘fair’ according to her own agenda. Guess who is ‘the teacher’ in Obama’s left-leaning utopia?

But what if she cuts everything into pieces and divides it up, passes it back? She’s still going to ‘take her cut’ of the pieces. In a classroom of 40 students (which was routine for my generation), she’d cut everything up into 45 pieces and she’d keep those extra 5 pieces. Maybe she’d cut it up in to 50 pieces and keep 10% and, as in the first scenario, some of those goodies are never going to be ‘redistributed’ back down to the classroom.

That nice piece of chocolate cake? Gone.

Now, for the kid whose mother is a drunk and who routinely gets margarine sandwiches, this is hopeful. But in your standard schoolyard economy, some kids are going to notice that he rarely gets a decent lunch and share – at least, that’s what we did in the early 60s and I can’t believe that my generation, the self-obsessed generation, was more inherently generous than the generations which follow.

*A man observed there were two dogs at war within him: one that does good and the other does evil. When asked which dog wins, he replied: “The one I feed the most.”

Perhaps I am.

To add to my dis-ease, I’ve been watching the amazing, illulminating and depressing series, The World At War, a British television documentary made in 1974 using actual footage. I never realized I watched it so close to it’s original release – it must have been the first U.S. broadcast, or very close. My boyfriend Tommy and I would watch it together. Part of what’s depressing about watching this film is the sinking awareness that humans really don’t tend to learn from history. Seems to me there’s an argument against Darwinian evolution in there but I’ll avoid that rabbit-trail for the moment at least.

The series spends some time understanding the dynamics at play in Germany that lead to Hitler’s rise and his popularity; whatever Germans said after their defeat, there was certainly a joyful ‘golden time’ for them after they defeated France with so little difficulty in1940, and there’s a lot of footage of adoring crowds and the very image-conscious, media-savvy Nazis, with amazing quotes about the importance of propaganda, of controlling and manipulating the population.

It hasn’t been a good time to hear the crowds chanting “Obama!” and notice chilling similarities between the popular response and the adept manipulation of media and image; it was really not a good time to hear he wanted to speak at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin…

Populations are fickle. Crowds have a distinct ‘persona’ of their own (I say this with more than 30 years of performance experience) and it’s easy to get swept up in the energy of the moment; everyone who experienced rallies against the Viet Nam war during the late 1960s can attest to this reality.

Obama tapping into the zeitgeist, saying the words “change” and “hope”  has excited a significant portion of America; Oprah stands up and asks, “Could he be– The One?” and the crowd goes wild. Never mind that he’s actually a classic Chicago machine politician and has never ‘reached across party lines’ to risk angering his Dem friends (making his promised unification of the nation impossible right there: if all compromise is on one side and all control and tap dancing on the other, the result is not ‘unification’) or that the kinds of change that he describes will result in bigger, bulkier government and less personal freedom; probably not the kind of ‘change’ that most of his fans are really hoping for.

And I have no idea how he’s going to arrange to have the planet start healing itself, as of several months ago when he so modestly accepted the nomination of the Democrat party:

“We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”

I wish we were smarter as a species, better at recognizing when we’re being manipulated, recognizing our own susceptibility and frailty. But as it stands, most people will associate the current administration with the current fiscal crisis and the same people will associate Obama with “change” because the mass media, especially television, persists in promoting those associations.

I really hope that we don’t have to live through an Obama administration, the inevitable sense of confusion that will follow: where are the good changes we were promised? Why has the economy tanked even more? Why isn’t government-run health care the panacea we were told it would be? Where is that promised tax break?!

I take some hope in the fact that there are fewer Obama 08 signs up in the neighborhood compared to Gore and Kerry signage in 2000 and 2004– we shall see.