Oxfam America Blog

Oxfam America Boston staffers watching the inauguration. Photo: Ephraim Freed

Like many of you, I watched yesterday’s inauguration with a crowd: my Oxfam America co-workers, and a few of their kids and spouses, too. At noon, many of us clustered around the big TV in the lobby of our office, balancing our sandwiches on our laps as we watched history in the making.

Amidst all the rhetoric of the day, I was particularly struck by one quote from President Obama’s inauguration speech:

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

What do you think: Are we really waking up this morning to a world transformed? And if things have indeed changed, what must we do, as individuals, to keep up the momentum?

University of Kansas students Zach Bealer and Christina Henning show off their (temporary!) Oxfam tattoos at a Kansas City climate change event. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America

I went to college in the late 1990s, at the tail end of the decade of the slacker. Back then, you might have seen a few activists here and there on campus, but mostly we cultivated an aura of general apathy right down to the laces of our Doc Martens. It was okay to care vaguely about stuff like women’s rights or the environment, but it wasn’t necessarily cool to show too much enthusiasm. If you wanted to make a statement, you might scrawl something enigmatic on your t-shirt with magic marker, dye your hair pink, and leave it at that.
At risk of showing my age, I’ll just go ahead and say it: things have changed.

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Surprise, surprise. For many of us, more than 24 hours later, the election’s still dominating conversations around the water cooler.

But it’s not just us. Take a look at what the world is saying about our historic election.

Last night I took my place inside the booth, only partially hidden behind a frayed red, white, and blue curtain. Balancing my paper ballot on a wobbly, dented metal shelf, I carefully filled in the circles using a thick black marker. After I stepped out and slid the completed ballot into the machine (wondering the whole time if I was putting it in backwards) the woman working the polls handed me the emblematic sticker—“I voted today.”

And I wasn’t alone. According to Politico, more than 130 million Americans also cast their ballots yesterday—the most ever to vote in a presidential election.

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In the past 12 months, as we’ve followed the incredible US presidential campaigns, I have periodically paused to try and “feel” this historical time. I can truly say that November 4, 2008, ranks right up there with other historical moments that I have experienced in my lifetime.  A man on the moon, even before I realized the significance of what we were watching on the neighbor’s tiny black and white TV screen. I cried during Nelson Mandela’s inauguration because I truly never believed we would see an independent South Africa in my lifetime.  The fall of the Berlin Wall. Who, in the worst of the cold war, would have imagined we would freely travel behind the Iron Curtain? An African woman Nobel Prize winner–despite the odds that place the African woman at the top of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged list. And yesterday, the first African-American President of the world’s slightly-shaky only superpower. I cried again, because–like many others–I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. I can now dare hope that this will not be “only in America,” but that we will see the same sort of unity of purpose–to live democractic ideals–in other lands that we care so deeply about. This is what history feels like: like HOPE!

How do you feel today as you head to the polls? Energetic? Scared? Excited? Ambivalent?

The New York Times website created a page just for today where you can choose one word to describe your current state of mind (no login required). In case your moods are prone to shifting during the course of Election Day, you can update your choice every hour. And you can also see how others are feeling as the most popular words stream by on the page. (The top choice right now: passionate.)

As for me, I selected “anxious” from the list. I was out until late last night making get out the vote calls, at which time I would have said I was alternately frustrated and elated, depending on who was on the other end of the line. But since I woke up this morning I’ve felt only a deep restlessness, a constant uncertainty in the back of my mind. I think, no matter the outcome, I just want it to be over.

What about you?

Muthoni Muriu, director of Oxfam America’s overseas programs, talks about why the US presidential election matters to people around the world—especially those living in poverty:

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