Unlike my cynical husband, who came home on election day with a new button that says "If voting could change the system it would be against the law" over a picture of a fat ass sitting on what's either a ballot box or a toilet, I am among the breathless Americans who choked up when they saw Oprah and Jesse Jackson crying in the Grant Park crowd. In fact, I tear up a little when I think of it now, or of the way I felt when I was driving in my hand-me-down 1996 Corolla, battling a sinus infection and with a box full of papers to grade, and heard Neal Conan announce that NPR had called the race: absolutely amazed, exhilarated, and de-familiarized with my surroundings. It felt like an out-of-body experience, to think that more than enough of my countrymen had finally wised up. 

In that spirit of renewed idealism, tempered with caution for the backlash that the RNC is surely hatching, I'm sharing this essay by Pico Iyer. I doubt if Obama had an Obake-busters tshirt, the true badge of a Gen-Xer from Hawaii, but I still feel he embodies some of the Hawaii ethos.