A Post-Election Post In Which I Get All Emotional

Having spent the better part of the first half of my life hiding my feelings, I figured out that being open emotionally is a key to good mental health, at least mine. As a consequence, I’ve spent the second half being straightforward when it comes to my gut, sometimes to the embarrassment of the people around me.

So get out your hankies and read on.

I’d already had some pretty good boo-hoos over the summer as Barack Obama’s impossible quest became improbable and then possible: The night that he clinched the nomination. The afternoon that he first introduced Joe Biden on the statehouse steps in Springfield, Illinois. During his acceptance speech at Denver’s Invesco Stadium.

But I was a veritable Niagara Falls on Election Night.

Having kept a stiff upper lip through the first two hours or so of MSNBC‘s excellent coverage, I began to crack as it became obvious that Obama wasn’t merely on the verge of becoming the 44th president, but was going to win in a landslide that would supercharge his mandate as the first African-American to lead all Americans.

I had lost my voice — only recently reclaimed after having screamed myself out during the Phillies’ clincher in Game 5 of the World Series — by the time Pennsylvania fell to Obama because old fart . . . er, hand that I am, I understood that other swing states also would tip to him.

I was sniveling — in my case a gulping insucking of breath and a few stray tears — by the time MSNBC was showing aerials of the tens of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park, a place that holds great feeling for me because of the 1968 police riots there amidst the last gasps of Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam War insurgency at the 1968 Democratic convention.

Then a camera found its way to Jesse Jackson, tears streaming down his face as he stood frozen in the moment in the crush of bodies before the stage in the park where Obama would soon speak.

Tears suddenly streamed down my face, as well, because that close-up meant so much: The ambivalence that I feel for the civil-rights leader, who while the most charismatic man whom I have ever met has been so maddeningly self aggrandizing and jealous in recent years as his place in the African-American power pantheon has diminished with the coming of Obama and other black politicians who now overshadow him on the national scene.

No matter, I understood that this was an enormously moving moment for Jackson, and I must say I don’t understand how the other blacks who spoke to me from my television set during the rest of the night kept it so together, including the president-elect himself.

I have nattered on in recent weeks about my late great civil-rights activist parents, how they could not imagine the day that a person with black skin would become president. And so my tears also were tears of joy for them because something that they dared not dream had come to pass, as has as my out-on-a-limb assertion way back in the spring, proffered more with hope than certainty, that this might be the last presidential election in which a person’s skin color mattered. (Not so with homophobia.)

But most of all, my tears were for the mind-boggling enormity of not the moment, but what comes next.

This is because while the election of Obama by a rainbow coalition of Americans is an extraordinary thing, that it was time for my fellow baby boomers to pass the torch, that Michelle Obama will be a killer First Lady, that watching their daughters Malia and Sasha grow up in the White House will be such a refreshing change from the botoxed frumpery of the Bushes, I understood what precious few of my fellow bloggers have grasped, or at least have been unable to articulate:

The election was the easy part. Showing our allies and foes alike that America’s greatness was not a mirage was comparatively easy.

Barack Obama now has the weight of the world on those skinny shoulders — its hopes, fears, deep complexities and hatreds. He will have to be equal parts technician and leader, and it will take an achievement that makes his election quest pale in comparison for him to succeed by any reasonable measure.