Last Tuesday, Inauguration Day, I don’t think very much work got done in America–and from what I hear from Canadian and European friends, a lot of people took time off  in other countries as well to watch Barack Obama become President of the US. We went to the local library to watch a video-stream on big-screen, and to sit among neighbors and be emotional together in public. Parents came in with kids, the Friends of the Library served coffee and cinnamon rolls, and it was a ceremonial moment. We cheered when the folks on the Mall cheered, stood when the national anthem played, and listened carefully to his first words to us from this high office of authority.

That night we joined about 300 Island folks to dance in the Freeland Hall. This wonderful community building has served to hold so many local functions from birthday parties and weddings to town hall gatherings, to canning the harvest, and wakes for the unchurched locals–I dare say this was its first “Inaugural Ball.” Potluck, of course. Someone’s son set up a sound system, and soon this high spirited crowd of mostly white folks were dancing to various decades of music under a projected CNN feed repeating the Inaugural moments. Children ran across the stage, playing in the video stream, their dancing, laughing bodies becoming part of the imagery. How different their America is, how different it will be, from the America of my childhood.

There are several thoughts from this moment that seem important to note–for this is a day of huge change in our national story.

First, the presumptions of my childhood are truly and (I pray) irrevocably over. Growing up in the Midwest of 1950’s and early 1960’s, America was presented to me as a white country with barely acknowledged minorities (none of whom were evident in suburban Minneapolis where the diversity in my entire school was the presence of two Jewish sisters). Media and advertising imagery was white, and all the people around us were white, and everyone in our school-books was white. Though my parents were sincerely liberal, the reality of other American subcultures was beyond my protected grasp…. and within the privileged cocoon of my skin and the places I have lived, the diversifying of the US has remained to some degree elusive in my consciousness–until now.

Today white Americans saw America as it actually is: wonderfully multi-ethnic and multi-dimensional. We are invited to truly understand that white people are part of the mix, but not the dominators we have sadly tried to be. The crowd at Grant Park on November 4th, the nearly 2 million people on the Mall on January 20th, this is us, the US, now. I almost feel in need of being welcomed into this new country. And it has changed my sense of relationship and dialogue with all those strangers around me: how we see each other within this diversity, now that we are led by a man of diversity, is a wide-open story. I am eager to notice what shifts in the coming months and years.

Secondly, the thought went through me that my generational impact is starting to wind down. I was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boomers. The eventual 75 million of us have been a huge cultural wave–reinventing fashion, music, arts, social norms, and liberation and consciousness-raising movements as we pushed forward decade by decade. And now, after just two passes through the Presidency, our generational leadership is replaced by this vibrant young man.  Two thirds of the people in Freeland Hall raised their hands when asked who was older than Obama: he is not young enough to be my son: not old enough to be my brother, the other end of the Boomer spectrum.

For the children and the grey-haired, our local party was over by 10:00 PM. The balls went on in Washington, and Michelle and Barack were out ’til 1:00 AM on a weeknight. Then he got up after 6 hours sleep and headed into work to try to make a functioning country again out of the mess we’re in.

Little work got done on Tuesday, and a lot of work has been getting done ever since! Every day there is a list of actions taken to correct our course, to restart America’s presence in the 21st century. It’s not possible to wipe out the past 8 years and the profound damage done in our name to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the folks who used to live in New Orleans, the young soldiers who used to have arms and legs, those who rest in the bloodied ground… It’s not possible to comprehend the shift from a $237 billion budget surplus in January 2000 to a $1 trillion budget deficit in January 2009. And yet the pervading mood  is a sense that truly an old story is over and a new one has begun. (Newsweek Magazine gave GWB an 81% shame rating as he left office: and Obama had a 68% approval rating at the end of his first week. The lady at the drugstore said today, “I didn’t vote for him… but I have to say, I’m impressed.”) We are picking up the threads of a different narrative and going on from here

And when a new story is gelling, it’s important to avoid assumptions about how things are going to go, or to set the path too firmly because we don’t yet understand the full range of possibilities. The storyfield needs to stay open-ended, ambiguous, contributory. My job, as we enter Obama’s Presidency is to keep praying thankfulness for his/their safety, and to keep open to the mystery that is unfolding in the world around me, from the local to the global, to keep noticing what is mine to do next. That’s what he is doing: the next thing, and the next: and that is what I’m going to do as well. And I’m going to continue to ponder my expanding awareness about what America is, what she might become, and what we grayheads have to offer the new age we set in motion while Obama grew up, and went to school, and to Harvard, and to Chicago and to Washington.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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