This is a good moment to catch the time spirit

[mogster]

Bush has gone, the power is transferred to a person we trust. It's a defining moment.
Up to the moment I saw Obama in the Oval room, I could hardly believe it. I waited for something horrible to happen, to take this moment away and plunge us back into the nightmare. As time progresses now, and we hopefully slowly awake from the Bush years into a more comprehensible and foreseeable world, it's a good time to catch the time spirit, because we are today living history. This change is not merely a passing phase, but a paradigm shift, like the end of WWII.
The time spirit is always available if you want to try to understand what happened during a given time period, but in the half light of dawn it's stronger because we still have the dark nightmare fresh in memory. We still can't believe the Bush years was just a bad dream, not a final reality - the spiral into fascism. I believed that until now. So we now have knowledge of how it is to see no hope in sight but one ray of light, making one final effort to correct things, without having any way of saying whether it would be successful or not.

The time spirit can learn us about how it was during the WWII, to live in that period and long for freedom, yet feel utterly powerless in how to deal with it as an individual. Their big secret is now visible to us; they did not know they were gonna win. As we look back in history, this fact is usually invisible because we did win, and all history books tells us how it was done. Litterature, films, documentaries, they all reaffirm it. But they can only tell a fraction of the story, in no way can they convey the fear of not winning, to an audience not familiar with that kind of fear. That doesn't feel that fear, don't know what it means. How could we not win?, they'd say. And point to the history books.
Of course, rationally, we can relate to them not knowing that they would win. Rationally, I can see the fright, the fatalism and despair, the incredible sacrifices being made for freedom. So rationally I know what it was like. But now I know what it is like to really have lost hope, to stare the monster in the eye and say; this is it, we're lost. I know what it's like to not know we're winning.
Soon this will pass. In some years, as the onion that was the Bush regime is peeled layer by layer, the time spirit will again be hiding. They will not know, in the future, how it was to live under the Bush/terror threat, not knowing if this was the end or not. Not knowing if the next terror attack would plunge us all into unknown realms politically, not knowing whether the people supposed to be on our side really wanted this to happen.
Oh, they will rationalize, deduce, dig, document and verify. All in all, they will have a better understanding of what went down during the time period from 2000 to 2009, because history is always a more fair judge than the contemporary. But they will be unable to bridge the fear gap and understand how it looked from the other side, from before you knew that Obama won the 2008 election. Maybe some author someday will try to depict how the world would have been if the war/terror cycle had been allowed to continue - to match our very own thoughts up and until the election was won, yeah, even until Obama was safely seated in the Oval room. But even if he manages to draw this picture clearly and vividly, he would not be able to bridge the gap enough to scare the shit out of his readers, because history has proven him wrong and his readers (hopefully) live in peace. Bush is in the past, it's an irrevocable fact.
Only we will know, who was awake and saw it happen, felt it happen.
It has changed me.

[mogster]

1. A last kick before this is archived

:-)