I Can Only Imagine

Back when I was a little girl, a man spoke of a dream.

One might say it was not my dream. My experience of racism, albeit proximate, was always at second hand: Lying to my grandmother about whose house I was going to, because if she knew it was Paulita, who was black, I might not be allowed to go. My school closing because race riots had broken out at the nearby high school. A friend attempting to justify the Bogan Broads--mothers of Bogan High students--pelting black kindergarten kids with rocks. An old white man sitting next to me on the bus and muttering insults about the black passengers, on the assumption that as a fellow white person, I must agree with him. 

Sure, it hurt me that I couldn't play with who I wanted, or had to lie to do it, that I had friends who sincerely believed that black children were a threat to them, that a stranger would assume by the color of my skin that I was a bigot. But nobody ever barred me from a lunch counter or a ballot box or a seat on a bus; nobody threw those rocks or those words at me. I was not battered by the storms of persecution, to use Dr. King's phrase. We are all diminished by racism, but I can only imagine how it must feel to be the person who experiences it firsthand.

And yet tonight I shrieked with joy, and tears streamed down my cheeks--still are, two hours later. I am so proud of my country, not because we elected a black man president, but because people looked past the color of his skin to vote for Barack Obama because he is a smart, thoughtful, capable person whose priorities and ideas are in tune with their own. And looking back over the past year: the two leading candidates of a major party were a black man and a woman, both of whose candidacies would have been unlikely if not impossible not very long ago.

A man had a dream about his children being judged by the content of their character. Today that dream is real.

There was a teenage first-time voter in line in front of me at the poll, a kid who beamed with pride after he pulled that lever. I didn't have to wait long to vote, but a lot of people did, waited hours. For too many years, there's been cynicism, apathy, around the political process. Not today. Today there was passion: people clamored to vote, wanted to make a difference (whomever they voted for); they gave a damn. Dr. King opened his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by  calling it "what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." Until now. The greatest demonstration for freedom took place today anywhere people cast their ballots. 

The theme of Dr. King's speech was hope: hope for a better tomorrow: "let us not wallow in the valley of despair." Hope was a theme of President-elect Obama's campaign, and he harkened back to Dr. King more explicitly in his speech tonight. Today we have realized yesterday's hope. Tomorrow we can realize the dreams of today.

Dreams often fall by the wayside as you get older. But when old dreams come true, they give birth to new idealism. And out of that hope can arise greatness.

I started the night looking back, feeling old because I remember when bigotry was institutionalized in the form of segregation. But I end the night looking to the future. We may not all get there together, there will be disappointments and setbacks and hard work, but I go to sleep tonight confident of a bright new day.

In the morning I'll go to work at my same job, where the first thing I have to do is finalize two books we're publishing that are ready to go to press, but were awaiting the outcome of tonight's election so we could know what to put on the last page. Meantime, we as a people will begin to write the first chapter of the next volume.