The Soul of the Moment ~ Election Night, USA

"I haven't seen so many Americans smiling - in the street, on the bus, at the stores, in school, even smiling at work so early in the morning - not since the seventies".

"Homemade fireworks broke out all over the neighborhood last night, just as the news were reporting the final vote counts", said TT., a New York born Hellene Cypriot of the Diaspora, presently in Oregon.

A moral victory - if not a social~political victory - is beginning to dawn within the awareness and the self-perception of Americans this morning: that tens of millions of "white" Americans actually voted for a Black presidential candidate, an African American who during the campaign was accused of everything from being a secret Al Qaida supporter, a "secret Jew", a crypto-terrorist, and even a Socialist (heaven forbid). And that the millions of socially disenfranchised African Americans, in alliance with all of the ethnic, religious and cultural "minorities", all of whom together plus progressive Euro-Americans constitute the real majority of the US, can be empowered through unity, organization, common mobilizations and campaigns.

All of a sudden, the mood of the people and the joyous feeling of a symbolic multi-racial unity, even despite the fact that Obama has clearly shown that as Head of State he will be the best servant of the Corporate Empire's ruling class, makes the previously unthinkable perhaps possible:
that America might regain its moral compass, that the people might actually begin to recreate their social reality.

Well, the world needs that new social reality - desperately. In this last decade, the US Government and its global Corporate Empire have driven the globe closer to the precipice of catastrophe than ever before. Millions of people put to the slaughter and the planet's ecology turned to ruin are testimony enough. If social and political changes are going to help the world turn again to Peace and Justice, the people of the United States are going to have to start making fundamental and effective changes well beyond electoral and symbolic gestures. But those are important, too, and they are welcome.

Here's what our correspondent reports from the US:


Election Night, USA
Special to Cyprus IndyMedia, by Mitchel Cohen
November 5, 2008

Went to a pool hall/bar in Brooklyn, New York, with Alex S., Linda Z., Cathryn S., and others. None of us voted for Obama (I voted for the Green candidate, McKinney) -- in fact, quite a commotion broke out at the polling place when Alex tried to do a write-in vote for one of the Socialist candidates -- but despite our votes (or maybe because of them) we all could feel and partake in the power and importance of what was happening last night!

It was amazing, all the hope bursting loose, like a huge weight being lifted from everyone's shoulders.

Somewhere after midnight 120 youngish folks (yea I counted'm, being anal that way) gathered from all directions in Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue and 7th Ave. cheering, kissing, hugging, cars honking, waving signs. It was exuberant, and this is the base that will push Obama despite his horrid advisors.

The same was happening in neighborhoods throughout New York City...

Even got a call at midnight from my 19-year-old daughter in Boston, crying with joyful tears -- "it's just like the 60s here, near the Commons, thousands of people playing guitars, everyone whooping it up hugging and kissing, so THAT'S what it was like..."

It's true. For a moment we are all sisters and brothers, even knowing that Obama's POSITIONS on the issues are very different than what most people believe them to be. But tonight, that was almost beside-the-point.

Or, maybe my brain has turned to mush, but the tears flowed freely. The symbolism hopefully takes on a life of its own and washes over the history of racism that this country was built on, and the desperate and ugly reality we're facing....

And then, getting into Alex's car, we turned on radio WBAI and heard 3 or 4 callers to Bill Weinberg's show analyzing the reality of the system. They were right, of course, but analysis is not everything. Sometimes the soul of the moment can carry beyond where the analysis will take you, can force the hand of history and change it.

Marx called it "ideology as a material force". I call it, the power of the people.

I don't have illusions about why Obama won. The capitalist class, for the most part, rallied behind him. Goldman-Sachs and other finace capitalists were his biggest contributors. So, we'll see how the young mass movement responds when Obama makes his first pro-war, pro-banker decisions. But we shouldn't see this as monolateral. There are huge forces that have been gathered, and they are competing to pressure Obama. We need to understand that Obama's decisions will reflect the power marshalled by those forces. And the system will carry on on its own regardless of his decisions, too, for changing a "system" requires revolutionary and not simply electoral change.

And those powerful mass movements ARE galvanizing. When a tv camera focused on Obama supporters gathering outside the White House, people shouted "Get Out, Now!"

Great movements grow from beauty, hopes, exuberance; those hopes are dashed when people are demoralized. Today, they are soaring as high as a kite. How much string will the capitalist class allow, before reining it in?

We need to intersect those movements, now, mobilize them, for it will be those movements that will bend the world in the direction of tomorrow's critique -- if it is to bend at all.

For now, what a beautiful, hope filled, exuberant night.

Mitchel Cohen, New York City
Mitchel Cohen is a member of the Brooklyn Greens, Green Party of New York, and Greens / Green Party USA, and a cofounder of the Red Balloon Collective, founded at SUNY Stony Brook in 1969.
Mitchel is also a co-founder of the No Spray Coalition, and a member of the Art-Rage, Direct Action Network to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, NERAGE (North-East Resistance Against Genetic Engineering), and many other environmental and social justice groups.

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The eyes of the whole world, now, are going to be on the US Government. Truly now, just as the demonstrators chant in the streets of America, "the whole world is watching".

With Obama at the helm of the Ship of State, will the US continue its Imperial policy of domination, slaughter, crusades, endless war, destruction of domestic and foreign democracy and social equilibrium? Will it continue on its course as a Ship of Fools? Will all the millions of voters who put Obama in the White House allow him?

From our corner in the Middle East and our Eastern Mediterranean vantage point that stretches for millennia we see Empires, Crusaders and Conquerors crossing over our lands and continents, subjugating our peoples, ripping out the heart of the earth as they go forward ...all of them ground to dust. Destroyed by our peoples' resistance and by the arrogance of their own leaders. Will Obama keep driving the machine the way his predecessors have been at it?

We believe in the honest motives and the genuine desires of the millions of Americans who voted for him; we believe that what they want for the world and for the US is Peace and Justice.

And it's up to the people to ensure things will go that way.
Cyprus IndyMedia Collective
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Related:
Will Obama's election repair the image of the US around the world?

Even the Corporate media are trying to milk as much as they can out of that spin: William J. Kole, an Associated Press writer reports from Europe that
"Suddenly, it may be cool to be an American again":
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_election_an_american_abroad/print

The photos above are from the popular celebrations in the streets, published by New York City IndyMedia here:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/11/101238.html
and here:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/11/101247.html
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