Clean.

I started this blog to document and celebrate the profound changes I see happening in this country and the world — changes in people (individually and en masse), changes in attitudes, changes in circumstances, changes in just about everything.

There’s something new and clean about today, this brand new beginning, this sparkling first day of a new more hopeful era on Planet Earth.  Electing Obama made us citizens of the world and brings the world closer to us in a way I hadn’t expected. But it’s true; I feel it.

Today on The View, Joy Behar said that to her, one of the important things about this election was that negative campaigning no longer worked. It’s true, and in fact something I’d noticed myself a couple of weeks ago,  but hearing her say it made me instantly sense and get the image of everything having been washed clean now, that the dirt and ugliness which that style of campaigning represented had been swept away — whoosh! — and everything left all fresh and clean, new and worthwhile.

I’ve noticed startling changes in people as well. John McCain’s concession speech was brilliant, and healing. Certainly we expected graciousness, but not to that extent. Even more breathtaking was George W. Bush’s speech. He actually sounded as if he meant most if not all of what he said.  And finally, Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View demonstrated today, in her remarks about Obama’s win, a remarkably open and bipartisan attitude about his win as well as going forward. She saw things in him, in his speech, that so many of the rest of us have seen, but which she seemed in days past, wth her sharply acrominious attitude toward Obama,  completely impervious to.  What a change a day — and a landslide election of a remarkable man — makes.

Three transformations in one day is quite a lot.  We all recognize that obama is a transformative figure, and a healer by nature in that he is intent on bringing people together. But I’m wondering if he is also healing on an impersonal, anonymous level as well? Maybe it was just the energies that swept him into office also operating on others.

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