Get Low

Maybe it's the actual hangover from the grand election celebrations (the extreme unease of not remembering much more than a few sad and silly details post-midnight). Maybe we are hungover from the happiness of the event itself, experiencing an inevitable swing toward melancholy. Maybe it's the dismal weather, general over the whole East. Maybe it's the grumblings of the coming holiday season. Maybe, horrors, it's just little old me--but I have a sense that low spirits are a common ailment this week. This election was such a fine distraction from the death rattles of the economy, a chance to birth something pretty and hopeful. And, my goodness, we did it. Bring on Bamelot (this morning's blessedly Post-y Post headline)! The guard has changed in Washington; we citizens made that change. But in the aftermath, we come to find that we have not changed. Each of us awoke Wednesday and today with the same pockmarks and difficulties and debts and memories, as ever. And the sun wasn't shining, and we were plagued with new fears of losing our beautiful leader, because it would take much more than the election of Barack H. Obama to restore our trust in America(ns). I have been top-full of ruminations. I am mourning something indistinct. Am I processing the last eight years, a tumultuous youth beneath a hideously out-of-touch and uncaring administration? Must a win always, after some time, register the memory of defeat or fears for the future?

I am twenty-three. Obama has been marketed as a candidate for my generation, and with good reason. He is just that. We adore him to distraction (whether we believed from the start, or voted for Senator Clinton in the primary). Ted Kennedy and many others said throughout 2008 that it was young voices that they heard and trusted, that their grandchildren told them who to stand behind. Why is it then that these inky ruminations of mine are about feeling old, positively world-weary, like I've lost things, time, like the property of youth is no longer with me, as if I've wasted and spoiled it? I've even caught myself getting jealous of teenagers on the street. I wonder where they will go to school, what they will study. Will they be happier than we were, in our age of narcissistic, drugged, greedy, fetid, disinterest in politics and the world (having seen elections stolen in 2000 and 2004)? We were the quintessential Ship of Fools, faithless, miserable about our leadership, but ultimately more interested in overpriced denim, The O.C., and 'The Black Album,' than affecting change. We were called apathetic and we laughed about it. Of course, it was us, not fifteen-year-olds, who voted for Obama, took part in his brilliant, grass-roots campaign. Having grown up, we have committed ourselves to action and a starry-eyed hope that eluded us when we were younger. I just wish this day had come before, before the market crashed, before we got embroiled in two messy wars, before we had alienated nearly all of our allies, before I had grown into a a regretful, slightly sour adult.