I realized over the weekend that I wanted to attend this event as a citizen, as a person who believes in the values of true democracy, and who believes that, flawed as the system is, it can still be bent to the virtues of those willing to engage it with principle and decency, and in that way, can be used to make life better and freer, even for the least powerful. And it came back to me what it was to witness the 15,000 people who did just this to attend then Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announcment speech, on 10 February 2007, when the conventional wisdom said he could never win.

We have to take the reins of our own connection with the world, we have to find a way to express the hopes and aspirations we have, in our manner of engaging the public sphere. Coming out to show that belief in a better way exists, that a movement can be what it says it is, that it’s worth hoping that an individual can acquire authority not for his own gain, but out of a sincere devotion to worthy service of the public good, is part of that engagement.

We drove to Silver Spring, Maryland, leaving New Jersey shortly after midnight, arriving shortly after 6 am, after a stop in Pennsylvania. The Metro station was flooded with people heading to the Mall, coming from all regions of the country. at least 4 ticket machines were out of tickets, and it looked like it could be a wait of several hours. Fortunately, one of the attendants let us through, telling us to pay on the way out.

The wait was not long and the train had room for most of us who were on the platform, around 7 am. By the next stop, it was packed to the limit and would begin skipping stations, with no one able to board. More than half our car stepped off the train at Chinatown, knowing or not knowing they would be asked to loop around the east side of the Capitol, and then walk through a tunnel crammed with foot traffic, to emerge on the other side of the Mall.

We continued on to Metro Center, and stopped in for a warm drink. I began writing, and my fellow traveler took the opportunity to answer nature’s call. We finished our drinks and walked the neighborhood in the direction of the Mall. We planned to enter around 12th Street, but were told we had to continue to 18th Street. There were now tens of thousands of people flooding in from all sides and it was virtually impossible to do anything but follow their general momentum.

We somehow pushed out from where we were and found our way to I Street, walking along to 18th, then turning down toward the Mall. We would finally enter the Mall around 10:30 am, amid a massive flock of seagulls gathering over the pond that lies between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Monument. The flood of foot traffic was coming up behind us and we made our way up the slow incline toward the foot of the giant obelisk.

We hoped to get in front of the Washington, to use the hill there as a perch from which to see the proceedings at the Capitol through binoculars. There was no chance. People had been camped there for hours, some overnight, and moving anywhere in front of the Washington Monument, far as it was from the Capitol, was time-consuming and a serious damper on the spirits.

We opted to retreat, in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, whose famed reflecting pool was enclosed by a capacity crowd. We made our way back to the monitors we had seen just after the World War II Memorial, downhill and to the west of the Washington Monument. The area was also crammed with people, but there were gaps. We found one and planted ourselves to wait the next 40 minutes or so till the ceremonies would begin. The atmosphere was electric and people were warm and friendly, no jostling, no hostility, no mob mentality.

There were some small demonstrations of protest, reminding passersby and the new president himself that there were policy changes being called for, on moral grounds. But there were no outbursts, there was no jostling, there were no visible heated arguments among people with disagreements about the definition of American values. It was a day when private conscience was shared in public, and people treated each other with dignity and respect anyway. Perhaps impossible on any ordinary day.

There was a persistent flow of good feeling, of people being generous with strangers, smiling and expressing a kind of faith in humanity, so rare in recent times, in the public sphere. One thing that occurred to me was that this was something people felt inspired by but also had permitted themselves to actually choose and to pursue, that so often we put aside our better emotions, our truer selves, because for some reason, we feel it is not really permitted in our environment, or it is seen as less-than or too far out to be justifiable.

That feeling of principled idealism, of knowing there is a right course, that it is not a sign of weakness to be both mature and executive, but also idealistic and cooperative, that being human makes it possible to see this, and that collaboration can happen and can be worked out in viable practical applications —in short, that being human is a hopeful experience, if we let it be, that sense of better or of possible improvements, that says we know who we are, we are good at bottom, we can break the ancient mold of power, in which might makes right—, is allowed to prosper here, is the unifying thread, that secret part of ourselves that genuinely cares and wants to trust in the possible virtues of a public sphere infused with good will and ideals… all that was flooding around the gathering multitude, and seems to be the real definition of this rare moment.

Can we remember this? The glories, many and resplendent, of the most visible overcoming and transcending of racial biases yet seen, are at the heart of the force of this moment, but that asepct of this renewal is just one of the symptoms of a spirit overtaking American politics. The new spirit of refusal to adopt the sinister logic of division and discrimination, so deeply rooted in the politics of the past, is bigger than race or party: it is a philosophical shift in popular consciousness.

Pundits and strategists mired in the constancies of past politics are falling over themselves trying to find an explanation, but a vast tectonic shift has taken place in the political appetites of the electorate. As candidate Obama hoped in his February 2007 campaign launch, we are seeing an “awakened electorate” at work.

Top-down rule is out of date, bur pro-active government is not. Social networking has converged with the passion common to millions for a public discourse in which humanity itself —be it the basic humanity of “real Americans”, of thinking people tired of agit-prop standing in for good policy, or of those tens of millions who cannot treat even simple illnesses, for the lunatic costs— has a resounding, relevant and central voice.

Barack Obama “sensed” this hunger, because —if we read his meditative memoir Dreams from My Father— he had always felt the tension between what was commonly done and what people hungered for. It’s not a political trick, then, but a man who can see clearly, with his mind open and his weighty self-confidence in service of his vision, not in service of an ideology, an excuse or a raft of narrow self-interests.

2 million or more impassioned citizens have turned out to inaugurate this new way, to say yes to the more inclusive, more thoughtful, more workmanlike brand of politics, freed from ideological bias, freed from Machiavellian vitriol, freed from the poisons of character assassination, focused, in all seriousness, on making a system that is designed to aim for and longs for its own betterment, actually a vehicle for betterment of the state of the Union, and the conditions available to its inhabitants.

The feeling in the air is of relief and exuberance at having defeated the many tentacles of cynicism in public life, having demonstrated that a candidate could speak out against the time-tested levers of power by which access is granted, challenge and go without their mechanisms —something that McCain in 2000 and Dean in 2004 could not pull off—, defeat the party apparatus, overthrow the conventional hierarchy, and still achieve a resounding victory.

The 20th of January 2009 is, for those gathered on the Mall, a “new birth of freedom”, a spiritual reversal, and a threshold moment marking the transition from one era in which cynicism used its deranged arguments to foist one self-fulfilling prophecy after another on the electorate, to one in which the language of possibility and the mechanics of human imagination shape the outcome of current and future events.

It was the right choice, unmistakably, to come to this historic gathering, to see a celebration of citizenship, of free assembly, of faith in a system that values human choice. Whether the spirit of the day can be manifest in policy initiatives, cooperative political negotiations, and humanitarian politics abroad, will be a test of the system and of those elected to represent it, and millions will be watching with a huge spiritual investment in the outcome.

After the ceremonies were concluded and the new president had left the stage that elevated him over the 2 million gathered, and framed him in the white of the house through which the people, in theory, govern, the crowd quickly and peacefully began dispersing into the streets around the Mall. There were special routes planned, to keep people from intruding into the secure zone set aside for the inaugural parade, in which Pres. Obama would walk through the streets amid tens of thousands of onlookers.

Many people chose to move toward the Lincoln Memorial, so prominent in the narrative leading up to and defining the historical moment of the 2009 inauguration of the 44th president. Obama’s candidacy had featured echoes of comparison to Abraham Lincoln, a “gangly self-made Springfield lawyer”, like Obama himself, who championed the anti-slavery cause, helped found a new political party, or a new moral majority, and kept the union together under the founding ideals of the Republic.

It was vitally important to many attending that there was a thread of historical resonance, running from Lincoln, through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his celebrated “I have a dream” speech at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, to Obama himself, an African American man ascending to the most powerful office in the world with a message of social justice, democratic ideals and principled engagement with those who differ from his perspective, an inclusive mission to cap a troubled history building up to a society of inclusion.

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change

A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.

We are emerging from a period of over-accustomed abundance, in which there was never supposed to be any doubt in the popular consciousness that generalized prosperity had reached a mythic level of sustainable undeniability; circumstance could not turn it back. That there was little real structural planning for sustainability was ignored. Economists, politicians, accounting firms, major banking institutions, and governments across the world, ignored the clear signs that flaws in the flow of matter and energy through an increasingly globalized economy were being obscured by convenient assumptions and poorly underpinned strategies.

Moments of exquisite beauty, of reverence for the mystery of the natural marketplace, became pervasive: the worship of plenty was so far-reaching, it seemed to be assumed that fashion icons could hold a philosophical stable center by waxing poetic about baroque ostentation. The bawdy glitz of Las Vegas, the all-at-once beaming-up of skyscrapers in Dubai, a quixotic-hubristic race to colonize the Moon, were hallmarks of the ’98-’08 balloon economy.

Meanwhile, the land of abundance was yellowing at the edges, the rich foliage of its temperate heartland was fading: the state of Ohio reached beyond 25% of the entire population officially on food stamps. Bankruptcies hit their highest level since laws were tightened in 2005. The fading of excess into a tired dream from an era of blind ambition meant we began to see that vast treasures could be diminished to a faint reserve of solace, scattered like guarded oases across the economic landscape.

Property values dropped. Oil prices soared. Banks pushed to cover unsustainable debt by 1) adding more unsustainable debt to their portfolios, and 2) using Congress to legislate against individual consumer bankruptcies. In August, home foreclosure filings again hit an all-time high —not the first record-setting month of 2008—, revealing a shocking level of underlying economic malaise. The dawn of an era of scaled-back expectations, of limited budgets, of belt-tightening and solemn fireside chats, had arrived.

As if every flaw and pitfall built into our way of functioning were invisible to even the most well-trained eyes, we basked in the golden distractions of a notion of manifest destiny, as if history were paying us its due for having imagined prosperity, suffered for it, and brought it into being. We thought nothing of the responsibility that comes with using with such endless hunger the resources available to us.

But the signs of a new “gilded age” were visible and were seeping into the consciousness of concerned observers. The problem was, however, what to do to forestall the onset of institutional chaos, an economic quagmire, the emotional unraveling of markets which had become the backbone of our projected fortunes. The political climate was calling for good news, not for good ideas, and so we collaborated in putting off awareness of what was in store.

Now, words like “depression” are on the winds of mass culture. John Steinbeck’s dustbowl epic The Grapes of Wrath is again a popular seller, not just for high-school required-reading lists. As a nation, we now face the problem of wanting to find warmth and solace, economically and spiritually, in a time of silver-cold rushing waters and a gathering storm of painful, forced change. In times of unwanted struggle, at the root of our basic humanity, we ask how much light and warmth we can derive from a bankside campfire, around which we tell the hopeful stories of a better day to come.

A thread running through those stories was the epic struggle of the 2008 election season, which began in earnest in the fall of 2006, officially during the first months of 2007, and led to an entire year of neverending dialogue about all things political, legislative, presidential and economic. The election was like a campfire culture that sprung up in cities and towns across North America and the world, in which people at the individual level, disenchanted by years, or decades, of political disappointments, began to think something new might be in the offing… an example of community-based leadership.

Yet the singular truth of the moment, related to that adage that “all politics is local” —what we learned from the need of so many to interact on a high plane of social discourse, of civic involvement— was that the individual will, the nature of one’s ability to grasp and to face difficulty, would be the root of recovery. If left on the open sands of desolation, the individual will could be strong, could be noble and definite, and yet falter; but coming together, negotiating around a campfire mentality of solemn devotion to a shared vision of liberty and prosperity, that individual will could be something more, something both brilliant and effective, part of a vibrant declaration of intent.

Admittedly, we could ask ourselves: can we direct our best efforts by way of “tried and true” mechanisms for steering the ship of state? Are the old ideas now out of touch, out of date, aged, brittle, risky? The ancient dichotomy between central planning and laissez-faire had been rusted over and abandoned; the split between social conservatives and economic progressives had withered; the logic of political confrontation was wearing thin. Something new was bursting on the scene.

As if to illustrate that a free people freely reinvents itself, and charts a new course, at will, with special vigor in the hardest of times, political strategy became a liability and complex examination of the facts and the future course of a people at last became the fashion. Clarity of thought before prejudice; hope and determination before fear and division; a sea change coming over the political culture of a deeply divided nation, struggling to find its way.

With the logic of edges, of the far edge of aspirational capitalism, the far-edge of binary politics, the far-edge of belief in ideals, combining to threaten the capacity of individuals, communities and political entities to envision a future of possibility, a logic of horizons grew up in the midst of concern and even panic. We saw that there could be a root structure deep enough to keep us from falling over the edge, into the deep of unsettled failings. We could reach the horizon and beyond.

The white of clear light, the blue of nourishing waters, the red of whole forest-scapes clamoring for a few last waves of warmth before winter: a dizzying but reassuring landscape of old growth entities, ideals and genuine concerns, informed our rudderless drift. Somehow, there might be another way, aside from sliding with the momentum of unstable ground, down into the waiting abyss; there might be the root-structure necessary for a fertile regrowth of economic and spiritual fortunes.

What may come next, what policies are precisely appropriate, what the existential value of competing political philosophies might be, if inclusion or exclusion are wise or perilous, became topics for discussion. Political discourse became a kind of heating oil to warm the spaces between living, working and fretting about impending upheavals, despite the persistent injection of wisps of hysterical fear-mongering. The space of political debate expanded into vastly divergent realms of life and culture, became a warmer, more habitable space.

As a nation, the United States of America has swelled from a band of small colonial villages to a continent-wide solid-state political union. Its history of democracy and humanist values has been fraught with dangerous threads of injustice, bias, hardship, combat and hypocrisy, yet its cultural thrust has been continually to move toward more openness, more inclusiveness, more equality and shared opportunity. The fall of 2008 was a season in which it became reasonable to most people to express concern that in fundamental ways, the nation had veered from that steady course, and needed new direction.

Like a pointilist composite of brushstrokes, the concept of new direction, together with the heat and light of economic distress, the urgency of concern about the security of one’s family’s wellbeing, the genuine worry that communities could spin apart or basic economic structures be allowed to decay, we found humanity seeking stalwart examples, straight arrows, a view of the land beyond the woody time of doubting.

Letting the old assumptions fall to earth, we seek a path to the other side. It could fairly be said there is a new atomization of the structure of society, a new decentralization of the tools of governance, in that politically, the vast center of American politics has summoned forth a style of campaign and a style of leadership that speaks to small entities across a vast narrative of history.

Local organizers moved thousands to volunteer, and the process of a general awakening about the difference between media-fomented cognitive dissonance and fact-based examination of safe passage to the spot beyond the horizon, refit the mechanisms of political discourse, and put control together with principle, in the hearts and minds of voters, citizens, actual people out across the landscape. The “conditions on the ground” became apparent, because a composite sketch of the emotional landscape, the moral and political priorities of a people, was better able to be drawn, from a debate about quality of ideas, as ideas and as practiced.

The old-model social-spending paradigm, as a way of competing with the “supply-side” fund-the-investors paradigm, shifted, and has been replaced by a complex ecosystemic mindset, which conceives of economic processes not as simple ‘expansion’, but part of a fabric of growth processes, a cultivation of longer-term potential for sustained abundance. A generative economics coalesced out of a host of strategies competing for absolute dominance of the political center.

If we could make something real and fecund out of the bewildering tangle of disappointments and excesses, if we could apply that reality like a ritual medicine to the workings of the collective mind, we could perhaps discover that amid the fallen visions and the dying embers of collapse, there is an already-existing road out of the wilderness, back to the heart of what we are as human beings. Generative economics is part of that renewed aspirational style, that desire to defy difficulty and the encroaching gloom, and seed the sustainable future, with what we have at our disposal now, in the present.

The startling array of concerns, perils, styles, ideas, crises, and best efforts, flowing together, could seem at times an unwieldy array of competing claims on our attention or our faith. But somehow, maybe because there is no other way, the future as seen from the real danger of extreme crisis comes to include illuminated approaches, that bridge gaps, heal fractures, draw from pools of shared awareness and reorient the mind to craft a more intelligent way forward.

There is a basic parallel between the growth of the individual mind, the salvage of a desolate spirit, and the process to which democracy, as a way of life and on the plane of ideals, of necessity, tends. The ability to reinvent a problem, so it can be better dealt with, to reinvent a social environment, so it can better adapt, to reinvent the meaning of government or principle or hope or failure, the ability to redefine crisis, is stitched into the process of changing a government, casting a vote for a philosophy about the future.

So, asking your forgiveness for the indulgent streak running through this essay, I return to the original question: what will this turning bring? We can see a new boldness, a feeling that somehow, it is necessary to filter the foreground from the background noise, to make a sincere effort at renewal, to put faith in actual human beings to do right by their fellow citizens.

We should see, coming into being, in coming months and years, new political coalitions, new social organizations, visions that seed the cultural landscape for improvement, working to ensure that the lessons for democracy that we now have at hand can actually be remembered, examined, and practiced. This is a time in which the aspirational and the factual can actually be seen coming together, in which we have given ourselves room to breathe, because we have trusted in the possibility of working to bring the real substance of a better day into being.

Dejeuner sur l’herbe : Hampstead Heath, London

Imagination versus Structure : Bristol

Arrivare fora del tempo : Lucca

Imperfect Communion : Manhattan

Cortado con Calvino : Barcelona

Fiume o tempi : Firenze

Parliament & River Thames in Light, with Dalí : London

Profundizar : Horta, Barcelona

Bread, or Opportunity : Southwark, London

Fortuna : Lucca

Knowing How to Be Together : Hampstead, London