Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
~ W.E.B. DuBois
Despite never having been much for political participation of any sort, there I was this past presidential Election Day, accompanied by my wife, throwing my vote down a Third Party's hopeless maw. In my mind, voting is to politics as pro-wrestling is to sports: an amusing farce, enlivened with empty boasts and the occasional skull-cracking chair.
My wife, God bless her soul, tossed her vote onto Barack Obama's mighty pile. Then off we went, invited to an election night party filled almost to the brim with unity, all rooting for Mr. Obama, all but me. "Watch your mouth, please" said my wife on the drive over. No need for the warning – other people have other opinions, and who am I to hold that against them? A world of unity would be a boring one besides, a Star Wars without Darth Vader.
It's not that I happily choose to forego the pleasures of losing myself in the crowd, but I can't pretend to believe anything that slips gently off a political tongue, even one so smooth as Mr. Obama's, and having read his books and listened to his speeches (which Ms. Kyle Anne Shiver beautifully summed up as "eloquent but non-specific"), I expect nothing but repeated disasters from his hand, each following the other, pulled from a socialist goody-bag. I am resigned to it in advance.
Yet, seated comfortably at the Election Night party hosted by my town's Obama for President headquarters, I found myself cheering my libertarian lungs when he took Pennsylvania from McCain, I hugged my wife as New York, New Jersey, and Ohio went Obama blue.
Part of it was the people I was with that night. I sat surrounded by many men and women who had first hand experience of the violence and degradation of racism, who had met Jim Crow personally. As Obama's electoral count rose steadily, their hopeful nervousness faded and was replaced by jubilant, stunned happiness. The bitter memories of water cannon and snapping police dogs turned to bittersweet wishes for now dead loved ones, to wish they were there to witness such a thing. It was a sight to see, and a nice one at that.
Back home after the party, my wife and I, as parents do, checked on our sleeping son before we went to bed. He lay below us, his fluffy fro outlined on the white of his pillow, and the blood of multiple races mixed in his blood. Taking my hand, "He can be president one day now, too" she whispered to me. I'd rather he gets a real job, something honorable, but I kept my mouth shut. No need to ruin a moment, plus there was another part of it.
You take what you can get out of life, and Obama offered something that McCain just couldn't hope to match. It's not the promised vague "change"; Obama's policies are much the same as McCain's, which are much the same as W's. What he gives us is a chance to finally step away from America's most sordid legacy, our irrational soul-crushing obsession with race.
That's a pretty impressive piece of flotsam for a survivor of our shipwrecked republic to cling to, and I'm happy for it as I float away with the tide.
February 21, 2009
