Walking to the polling place to vote for Barack Obama in the dawn’s early light this first Tuesday in November, I found myself in remembrance of two events.
The first was two years ago, upon celebrating the Democratic victory in both the House and the Senate. Within days, if not hours, private speculation among my friends as to who would take a run at the White House in 2008 began to heat up, dreaming up Edwards vs. Romney, Clinton vs. Giuliani. Obviously, the remaining two years of a Bush administration could not pass soon enough. Had I a chance do it over again, I would have relished a few weeks free of political speculation. We’ve endured this presidential campaign for nearly two years now, and in those early days Obama looked like an outlier. A relatively new name on the scene, he didn’t look like he could hold his own when pitted against the Clinton dynasty. Considering he was also a Black man, the conventional wisdom dictated that while America might have one yet, we weren’t yet ready and it just wasn’t going to happen; a line of thinking that seems to have stymied real environmental progress for the past three decades, as well.
Earlier this year, those of us who voted in the Democratic primary decided that, no, we can be progressive on these things when we damn well say we are, the alleged ladder of progress be damned! Either contender really would have presented us with a solid choice for a President and an opportunity to break ground for history, but we decided that Obama was the best foot to put forward. Watching his performance in both the primaries and the general campaign has solidified this choice as a prudent one. The jokers running McCain’s schizophrenic campaign have only highlighted Obama’s strengths: levelheadedness, thoughtfulness, and a demonstrated ability to listen sagely to his advisors and lead a massive operation.
It’s hardly all about race, but race’s significance can’t be denied. On a personal note, I am reminded of one day in my sun-drenched childhood room in Kea’au, Hawai’i, a rather well-integrated corner of the very home state of Senator Obama, myself no more than seven years of age. The most recent issue of Kid City, an educational magazine had recently arrived, and I as eagerly reading it cover-to-cover. In the center of the magazine’s layout was a multi-page comic commemorating Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. The stories were familiar, but somehow the dates were not. Seeing the year printed next to a depiction of separate “White” and “Negro” drinking fountains threw me for a loop: segregation existed at the time my mother was my age. The recency winded me, and, troubled, I demanded of my mother what the hell all that was about? A startling few generations have passed between us and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time, the need for a civil rights movement seemed so archaic and distant that for me it occupied a space on the timeline roughly adjacent to George Washington and Jesus.
It was a feeling I’d experience again some years later when I learned of Japanese internment in the forties, or the staggeringly unamerican pursuit of so-called unamericans under the supervision of Joe McCarthy. Since its inception, America, a land of ideals, has betrayed them. These eighteen years ago, with friends of Asian, Hispanic, Polynesian, and all other kinds of descent (I was also bizarrely under the impression that my father actually was black), this jostled me. I neither cared about nor comprehended race at the time, and it took me many years of education to begin understand (and, sadly, even pick up some) the racial discord that still lingers in our country.
Barack Obama does not signify a tidy solution to racial harmony. Indeed, we still have a long way to go. Still, twelve hours from now, it seems very likely that we will be describing one President-Elect Obama. The prospect is exciting. Despite the fact that my votes today (admittedly, straight Democrat, though I refuse to hit the “straight Democrat” button) will not likely help out much of anybody, considering I live in the beautifully gerrymandered city of Salt Lake, there was a sense of history to watching the Diebold machine print up my ballot.
I hope we’re in for a good four years.
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This post was finished in haste.
