The long, dark saga that began in Dade County on November 7th and ended in the U.S. Supreme court building on December 12th, 2000 has lived on far too long in my heart. I was 24 years old and was deeply and emotionally invested in a political election for the first time in my short life. I was scared to death, and had every reason to be.
In 1996 I happily cast my Florida punch-card ballot for Bill Clinton but never felt that there was any real danger that my side would not prevail. Bob Dole had already been written off and Monica had yet to raise her head from beneath the Resolute desk. I was comfortable and confident in the future direction of the country and the leadership under whom this great nation would rely.
The fall of 2000 was a very different story; a darker story. Bill Clinton’s impeachment had seriously marred the Democratic Party’s brand and the country seemed to be listing toward a yokel from Texas who ran entirely on an “I won’t get blown in the Oval Office” campaign promise. This country that I loved so dearly seemed to have lost its collective mind. Gone were concerns over the economy or the environment. The Democratic ideology’s eight year success story was completely drowned out in cries of “bringing dignity back to the White House”. Social conservatism had found its whipping boy and was driving out the vote in every backwoods holler and gin still across the continent. With the help of a complicit Supreme Court, an ex-alcoholic, dim-witted coke addict who believed that Jesus wanted him to be the President came to power. This powder keg was lit on September 11th, 2001 and the long darkness began.
In the first four years the Bush administration took away our most basic rights of privacy and Habeas Corpus. He began an unjustified war against a country in hopes of killing a man his father could not. To feel like a big man, and resolve his own father issues, he killed thousands of American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, and spent billions, soon to be trillions of our hard earned tax dollars. He inspired fear and distrust across the population at large and manipulated our deepest held beliefs and most firmly rooted fears to better himself politically and his friends and supporters financially. He divided this nation unlike anything seen since the Civil War, and certainly unlike anything I have ever seen in my lifetime. This is where fear comes from. I no longer trusted my country. I no longer felt like a part of my country. I felt divorced from my country. I felt as though my beliefs were not with the ruling party and I was therefore only a passenger on this wild roller coaster watching all that I had held sacred besmirched and gutted while the rest of my fellow Americans were complicit to the carnage. I watched a small subset of religious radicals dictate national policy aimed at stopping another small subset of religious radicals by removing rights from all the rest of us. It felt like a dream, albeit a nightmare of the most surreal kind. Torture is okay now. Spying on American citizens is okay now. Unprovoked war is okay now. The separation of Church and State is a quaint idea now. I began to resent America. I began to resent Americans. I began to resent myself.
In 2004 a scared and manipulated populace reflexively gave the George W. Bush his job back. They were so scared they didn’t know what to do otherwise.
But at the same time something else began. A movement began. America hasn’t seen a movement since the sixties. My generation doesn’t know what one looks like, so we were somewhat slow to respond immediately. We didn’t really know what we were seeing, and to be honest we really didn’t believe it could be done. We felt the sentiment, but did not think our voices could be heard.
My disillusionment was shared!
Others felt as I did!
All we needed was a voice! And, OH MY GOD, there it was, coming out of the mouth of a skinny black man I had barely heard of before. And the crowd went fucking wild!!!
“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us … Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.
… We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
I would like to say that this rocked my world, but my world was too cynical and hard to be rocked at the time. My heart sped up and a tear or two may have been shed, but there was a more pressing political concern at hand in the re-election chances of the current administration. And just as quickly as my hopes were raised, they were dashed yet again that November.
Don’t get me wrong, I was never moved by Kerry. I was voting for “Anyone but Bush”, not for John Kerry. Bush won, but something began to creep into the American mindset. Bush’s approval numbers began a steady decline almost immediately after his re-election. The mood of the country began to change. We as a nation began to think that we could and should do something better, more honest, more inclusive, less divisive. Something in America was stirring.
In order to try and get over my depression and fear after the 2004 election I went out and picked up “The Audacity of Hope”. I read it. I loved it. Within me, the movement began to become a little more real.
In 2006, the Democratic Party won a landslide of congressional seats and firmly repudiated the ruling Republican party. The movement began to solidify even more. I began to believe. I began to hope. I stopped feeling so alone. I began to dream of a better future for us all. I began to feel that this world just may be worthy of presenting new life.
I was an early and ardent supporter of Barack Obama from the time he announced his candidacy from Springfield, Illinois on February 10, 2007. But I was a cynic. I didn’t really believe it could happen. I could not allow myself to hope yet. Only in my dreams could such a thing be possible. I was behind him all the way, but when push came to shove I called myself an Edwards supporter. I thought he had a better shot, and I truly believed that the best I could hope for was any Democrat who could win. My disillusionment was still too strong, my soul still too weakened, my opinion of America still too dark.
Barack competed, and raised money and created a grassroots following. Then he won the Iowa caucus and I dared begin to open a crack into the shell I had spent so much time building up around my hopes and dreams. Five days later, that shell was blown wide open, not in victory, but in defeat.
As I watched this speech for the first of the hundreds of times I have watched it, something fundamental inside me broke. An emotion that I had never really allowed myself to feel before began to overpower me in a way that was completely unexpected and absolutely magical. It goes beyond “Hope”, though that is a great word to describe it. It goes beyond excitement into a place of catharsis and wonder. Shakabuku of the highest order.
I believed! I believed in him, but more than that I believed in everyone else. I believed in America and what we could accomplish together. I believed in my fellow man that we were not all duped into the “permanent republican majority” of division and hate. I believed in myself, and my place in this greater community that is the United States of America. I allowed myself to open my heart to this movement, to allow myself the possibility of being hurt yet again by the political process and this country I so greatly love and admire. I put myself out there and joined this movement with my eyes wide open and buoyed by a national outpouring of the same.
The primary season was long and hard, and the general election was even more of the same but so much worse in the way that the forces aligned against us were of such a polar opposite opinion and really sought to not only win an election, but to destroy the unity Barack represented by attacking the movement itself instead of the policies it upheld. The idea of a Real America and Fake America were thrown about in an even more despicable version of divisive fear-mongering than Bush’s. Throughout it all, I maintained my hopeful outlook and refused to believe that we could lose.
November 4th, 2008 represented a sea-change, not only in American politics, but I believe in the way we will forever live our lives. The media will not report it, and those who were so strongly divided against the new majority will take a long time to realize it, but the world will never be the same again. I will never be the same again. My opinion and understanding of what this country is capable of has been shook to its very core. At 11pm EST I watched Barack Obama declared the winner of this long election cycle and the new President-Elect of the United States of America, and as those words were announced, I unabashedly wept. I wept for the end of this long political nightmare that has finally come to a close and I wept for the gleaming future I can now imagine for myself and my fellow Americans. Those two tears from February blazed a path clean through me that rejoiced and still rejoices. I feel like America is my family once again. I feel like a part of something again. I feel like my country works for me now, and not against me.
On January 20th, 2009 Barack Obama will be sworn in and become the newest President of the United States of America. On January 21st, 2009 my wife and I expect to bring our first child into this world. My firstborn son will enter as one of the newest citizens of an America whose dreams and possibilities have been restored for all her people. He will be born under the red, white and blue banner that will once again hold up its true and original meaning of freedom and liberty and individual rights. He will be born under a creed as old as the nation, but only proven last night, that all men are created equal. He will get to grow up in a world were all of America is the “real America” and America works for everybody, not just the rich or well connected. He will grow up in a world were he can genuinely expect that he can achieve anything. And he will only be one of the first of many, many more to come. One of Obama's Children....
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