Note: This essay will be included in an upcomming book about the presidential election. For more info, contact me at johnwconnellyjr@yahoo.com or message me on here
I can hear the crowd even now, months after that November night. I can still faintly hear the patriotic music, and can still see in my mind’s eye the enthusiastic faces. Young college kids dipping their toes for the first time in the deep waters of democracy. Elderly men and women who had worked their fingers to the bone so those college kids may have a better future. A retired Jewish school teacher, and her companion, a miniature poodle whose collar bore a pin reading “Dogs for Obama.” A young Black child -probably around nine or ten- who clung to his mother. Both mother and son seemed moved to tears. One volunteer sitting behind the podium wore a turban. Another had dyed her hair a bright florescent color. A White man closely held his Asian girlfriend. My brother and his boyfriend, standing beside me, both held American flags and bore Obama ’08 buttons. I was reminded of how Langston Hughes, the bard of Harlem, once described Americans, “I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart/I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars/I am the red man driven from the land/I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek.” Hughes goes on to say that “I am the young man, full of strength and hope.” That was exactly as I felt that night in Philadelphia, knowing that mere hours after that rally the election cycle would officially be over. My brother, his aforementioned boyfriend, and I had spent that afternoon doing last moment canvassing for Obama/Biden, and that night we attending a rally at which Senator Biden spoke. I remember chills running down my spine as I was told that the future of America rested in my hands and in the hands of those surrounding me. For the first time in my short and cynical life as a political junkie, I believed the old platitude. The winds of change were blowing once again that night in Philly, and as the old Dylan song goes, I didn’t need a weatherman to tell me about them. I felt those old winds blow again today, watching Obama’s Inaugural Address at my high school. As the other students in the room sat reverently quite, I realized that they too had been swept up in a cyclone of social consciousness.
Of course, the weather affects us all differently. I think of my friend Phil, an aspiring lawyer, who is energized by the idea that he will witness an African American taking the Oath of Office, knowing that men who shared Phil and Obama‘s skin tone had been denied the right to vote only decades before. Many see the man sworn in today as a zeitgeist, one of those rare individuals who speaks for a generation. This is the same reason why my brother, a man who I have never seen show the least bit of interest in politics, campaigned this election season. This is why millions of young people across the nation worked so diligently for Obama/Biden. For many of us, Obama represents the things most admirable about our nation’s past, and our hopes for a better tomorrow. The poem I cited in this essay’s first paragraph is entitled “Let America Be America Again.” This was the plea on many voters minds as they entered the voting booth this past November, and the one on my lips as I watched Obama and Chief Justice Roberts at the podium today. Let our country regain the position it once held in the world community. Silently, my friends, family, and community members, are praying that Barack Obama may be the one to right lead us toward a brighter future.
My Cousin Christy, a woman who in the 1980s was ostracized by her peers for daring to love a black man now will sees a president whose heritage is not all that different from that of her sons and daughter. My Grandmother worked as a cleaning lady at a college campus in the 1960s and identified with those working for racial justice at the campus. Born just 23 years after the disastrous Plessy V. Fergusson Supreme Court ruling and 35 years before Brown V. Board of Education; she had the pleasure of watching on her TV at the age of 89 as a Supreme Court justice swore in a man who could legally be refused work because of his race under the Plessy decision. It is tempting to see Obama’s victory as simply one for racial unity, but in my opinion this misses the point. I think of Maya Angelou’s comments recently on PBS that Barack Obama is not a Black president, but an American one. “He excludes no one. The poor White, the poor Black, the poor Asian, Native American, Latino, he brings everyone in. He says… I’m here for you,” the poet said. This is getting to the heart of the matter. We do not need a leader for some of us. We are all in the same boat, and if we are not all following the same captain, than we run the risk of crashing on the rocks. Indeed, by his own words, Obama wishes to extent a hand toward all of his fellow Americans regardless of ethnicity, religion, or any of the other petty differences which have divided us in the past. As he reminded us today, “our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”
It is tempting to see this one election as the finalization of the dreams of those who fought for Civil Rights and equality in our country. I understand that one event does not make up for years of segregation, brutalization, and bigotry. The dark, and often unreported, side of the American Dream is that many of our fellow citizens have wanted to make the Dream a sort of gated community. Joe Biden’s ancestors came to America greeted by signs saying “Micks Go Home,” and “Irish Need Not Apply.” Michelle Obama’s came to our nation’s shores greeted by slave auctions. Asian immigrants were banned from owning land in many states, Jews were accused of being disloyal to the government, Russian immigrants were deported en masse in the early 1900s, Hispanics have often been used as scapegoats, and Arabs are now victims of unfair profiling. The KKK sprang up in the South, and were hardly alone as foot soldiers fighting against the promise that “all men are created equal.” Indeed, one of my ancestors had a cross burned on his front lawn for being foolish enough to think he was welcomed to the First Amendment guarantee that citizens may practice religion freely. No, few would be foolish enough to believe that this one victory would undo all the wrongs of our nation’s past. However, what it does represent is that progress is still possible, that the light which guided our predecessors as they dealt with slavery, racism, sexism, greed, religious intolerance, and other injustices in the past still shines, and will still guide us onward as we deal with the issues which still plague our society. That, in Obama’s own words, “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” That is our job, to make sure that we do not forgo our responsibility to the past. The struggles which have defined us in the past have always been the struggles which aimed to make us all a little more equal, and a little more free. In President Obama, I believe that those who wish for a better tomorrow have an ally. However, it is important to note, the battle rages on.
