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Wednesday, November 5. 2008
This Defining Moment
“At this defining moment, change has come to America.”Forty years and seven months ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”
At 8:05 p.m. Pacific Time, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois — from the Land of Lincoln — brought us into the Promised Land. That was the defining moment when change came to America.
A year ago you could not have convinced me we would see an African-American elected president of the United States in my lifetime. The racial divide was still that wide, that deep. Indeed, 22 months ago when the scrawny young man who had but a couple years of experience in the halls of the United States Senate declared his candidacy for the highest office in the land, and as my friend Lisa of Canada reminded me — Leader of the Free World — it was with just mild interest that I took notice, that most Americans took notice. We would not see a Black Man elected President of the United States in our life times.
Never have I been happier to be proven wrong, to see my cynicism and sarcasm tossed aside by the forces of history, pushed out of the way by the power of a new generation and the positive attitude of several generations that said “Yes we can!”
We have been to the Mountain Top and now we are in the Promised Land.
As if talking directly to me and the millions who thought as I did, President-Elect Barack Obama of America said, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”
Yes it is. Anything is possible in America, any child can grow up to be president of the United States, the senator from Illinois not only told us, he showed us. Like the Doubting Thomas from the Gospels of the Bible, we have touched the wounds of racism, to see that they are real, to know that truly, a man who is not a White Man has been elected President of the United States.
Change has come to America. Not just from an eight-year presidency and political control that ran our nation into the ditch, the impetus of this remarkable moment, but a change in the way we think of America. People of color, be they Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American, can achieve whatever they set their minds to, whatever their hearts demand of them.It not only confirms that the dream is real for people of color, but that it is still true in these United States that all of us can achieve that which our hearts desire, that the American Dream, however it manifests itself in our hearts, is within our grasp as long as we have the “industry” to work for it.
In my lifetime I’ve seen a young Catholic named John F. Kennedy elected president, a generational shift that brought America fully into the 20th Century. A man walked on the Moon just eight years later, a triumph of man’s will to achieve the impossible and we no longer thought of science fiction as fantasy. It was real. Neal Armstrong walked on the Moon. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down as millions declared an end to political tyranny.
And at 8:05 Pacific Time on November 4th, 2008, the news pundits confirmed what many of us had felt building for the past two months, confirmed what had been written in the first paragraphs of our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It took a perfect storm of a war gone bad, a government caught asleep at the wheel during a national emergency, scandal and corruption in the high corridors of power and a financial crisis we haven’t seen since the Great Depression, for this moment to arrive. And it took the hard work of millions who gave their time, energy and money to the cause.
The money, primarily from people who couldn’t afford to give as the donors to previous campaigns once did, in big bundles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in small amounts as little as five dollars; that money defined the candidacy of Barack Obama. It was borne on the hopes of millions of Americans, not the greed of the few who openly bought government with their millions in campaign donations.
This was a campaign finance reform no one had envisioned; that, like some Frank Capra movie starring Jimmy Stewart, the multitude once left behind by the big money controlling Washington, had taken matters into their own hands, from their own wallets, and changed the course of history.On January 20th, 2009, Senator Barack Obama from Illinois will be sworn in as our 44th President of the United States. Is it irony that this comes from the same state that 148 years ago gave us Abraham Lincoln? The cynical side of me still thinks so, but that fact didn’t escape President-Elect Obama. In his speech Tuesday Night, Obama reminded us, it was from Illinois that our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, first brought the Republican Party into the White House.
As Barack Obama quoted Abraham Lincoln, “We are not enemies, but friends ... Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
We can now crown our good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.
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