Seeing problems

I'm thrilled that Obama won, but now that it's Thursday (2 days after the historical victory of the spirit of our great country), I'm back to thinking about me. I'll bring it back around to the political, so bear with me.

When I was a very small girl, I had night-terrors. I would wake my parents, my father would try to soothe me with milk and tales of tryptophan, and then he would send me off to bed. They eventually got a little impatient with that routine. So I got into the habit of getting myself out of bed, drinking some milk, and reading on the living room couch.

One night (I was probably around 8), I awoke from a nightmare, and we were out of milk. I got my book, but feeling especially sorry for myself, I sat on the couch and cried. The sobbing woke my father, and for some reason, I didn't want to tell him why I was sad. Instead I blamed it on the book. (In retrospect, the book, The Secret Garden, may have set the mood.) He took it away from me and sent me back to bed. I assigned fault to the book, and my father accepted that assignment. (The truth came out later. That night and others like it were nascent expressions of what came to be my mental illness.) No matter why I lied—shame, my need to please, their demand for me to be perfect—this memory strikes me as a metonym for the lies my family used about my true need for help.

I don't raise this specter of self-pity to simply rile your emotion. Rather, it's a micronic (not a word but should be) analog of what we as Americans do as a nation. We lie to each other about the "housing bubble," say, then the bad mortgages, then the interest rates, even as they compile upon adjacent economic injuries. Only crisis draws enough truth around itself, and by doing so is revealed.

As we celebrate President Elect Obama—it feels so good to write that phrase—we hope to wait for him to take office so that he can address what's happening in our country and in the world. Will we lie to each other or will we point to the tide of the next crisis? Can we even see it yet? Where is the child, the book, the father? Let me say that I have great confidence in Obama's leadership. Having a post-Boomer, Black president should cause us joy, but may it not blind us to his need to please and our demand for his perfection. May it not blind us to our continuing moral problems, both at home, abroad, and in those nebulous, lawless plots of land we refuse to claim as our own. May the smug enjoyment of our right choice not deflect our insight: Electing Obama does not make America virtuous. It simply makes us better.