This is my America (My last political post on this blog for a long time)
This will be my last politically-associated post on this blog for a while.
You have my permission to forward/post this. I am sending it to everyone.
I couldn't leave the office tonight. I was glued to MSNBC.com. Each return from break took my breath away, and as they tallied up votes, I felt more enthralled than I ever have at any sports event.
Today's election brought us to a new nation. Today, we are living in my America.
My America has lived only in my mind for a very long time. It was an idea buried in our oldest documents, that "all men are created equal." I said that in my heart but never saw it with my eyes until today.
On MSNBC tonight, they spoke openly of slavery. Not with the usual prefix of "the horrors of slavery", or "that dark time in history", but "slavery": simply, straightforward, and factual. "We have a checkered early history in America. Slaves laid the foundation of the White House." There was no shock or embarassment, no hemming and hawing. For the first time, the past could live in the past, and be left there.
For the first time, I got to see black people as people today. Not that I didn't want to before, or that I ever felt anything against them. Culturally, psychologically, subconsciously, the history we've all had to bear had divided me from them, not out of how I saw them, but fear of how they saw me. Today, I don't think it could have been made more clear that we, as a nation, want to love each other, as a nation, and feel that kinship returned.
The racial issue will be the one most heralded today, but it's only one reason why today is so important. My America has always been the land of opportunity. Since our earnest beginnings, we have held our hands out to "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses." We never promised a hand-out, never promised an easy ride.
But opportunity. A fair chance to reimagine yourself through hard work and love of country. In those early days it was lack of religious freedom, of opportunity to work, of opportunity to speak and believe as you wanted.
Today we are faced with a new set of struggles. Our huddled masses can work, and speak their mind, but they are too sick to work, and too ill-educated to speak. Our challenges today are not about religious freedom. We live in a world ruled not by the labor of your muscles but the potential of your mind.
And in the election of Barack Obama, people have said, very clearly, that the time has come again to make America a land of opportunity, where every child can grow up with the confidence borne of an educated mind, unwearied by sickness. Where people are truly not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.
These are not changes that will happen today. We still breathe in a darkness that has held for more than two hundred years. But tonight, I saw the first hint of dawn. And it lights the way to a land I thought for so long I had only dreamed of.
It's the way to my America.
And it's with tears in my eyes that I can finally say, "Welcome."
You have my permission to forward/post this. I am sending it to everyone.
I couldn't leave the office tonight. I was glued to MSNBC.com. Each return from break took my breath away, and as they tallied up votes, I felt more enthralled than I ever have at any sports event.
Today's election brought us to a new nation. Today, we are living in my America.
My America has lived only in my mind for a very long time. It was an idea buried in our oldest documents, that "all men are created equal." I said that in my heart but never saw it with my eyes until today.
On MSNBC tonight, they spoke openly of slavery. Not with the usual prefix of "the horrors of slavery", or "that dark time in history", but "slavery": simply, straightforward, and factual. "We have a checkered early history in America. Slaves laid the foundation of the White House." There was no shock or embarassment, no hemming and hawing. For the first time, the past could live in the past, and be left there.
For the first time, I got to see black people as people today. Not that I didn't want to before, or that I ever felt anything against them. Culturally, psychologically, subconsciously, the history we've all had to bear had divided me from them, not out of how I saw them, but fear of how they saw me. Today, I don't think it could have been made more clear that we, as a nation, want to love each other, as a nation, and feel that kinship returned.
The racial issue will be the one most heralded today, but it's only one reason why today is so important. My America has always been the land of opportunity. Since our earnest beginnings, we have held our hands out to "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses." We never promised a hand-out, never promised an easy ride.
But opportunity. A fair chance to reimagine yourself through hard work and love of country. In those early days it was lack of religious freedom, of opportunity to work, of opportunity to speak and believe as you wanted.
Today we are faced with a new set of struggles. Our huddled masses can work, and speak their mind, but they are too sick to work, and too ill-educated to speak. Our challenges today are not about religious freedom. We live in a world ruled not by the labor of your muscles but the potential of your mind.
And in the election of Barack Obama, people have said, very clearly, that the time has come again to make America a land of opportunity, where every child can grow up with the confidence borne of an educated mind, unwearied by sickness. Where people are truly not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.
These are not changes that will happen today. We still breathe in a darkness that has held for more than two hundred years. But tonight, I saw the first hint of dawn. And it lights the way to a land I thought for so long I had only dreamed of.
It's the way to my America.
And it's with tears in my eyes that I can finally say, "Welcome."