“We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told that we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes we can.”
- Barack Obama
It’s 3:14 in the morning, November 5, 2008. I’m sitting in my Portland apartment, finishing off the bottle of syrah by myself because everybody else has already passed out. As I write this, Barack Obama is the President-Elect of the United States.
It’s only within in the last few weeks that I let myself believe I would ever be able to write those words. And now that I can, I’m so happy I’m crying.
But maybe that’s just the wine.
*
For all my friends who are terrified of what’s to come, who want to move somewhere else, who are afraid of socialism, of higher taxes and abortion and atheism and leaders who don’t seem quite “American” enough–I don’t agree with your fears, but I understand them.
I felt exactly the same way eight years ago.
I understand what it’s like to vote based on fear, because I did it too.
I was afraid that despite all precautions, I would find myself pregnant and totally emotionally and financially unable to support a child, and yet be forced to carry it to term anyway.
I was afraid that I would someday live in a world where Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell would grow to have more power than Martin Luther King, Jr. ever did.
I was afraid that some of my friends would never be able to get married despite being deeply in love with each other, just because the person that they had been biologically engineered to fall in love with was not Biblically appropriate.
I was afraid that my friends — mostly servers and bartenders without health care — would get in car accidents and rack up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills that they would spend their entire lives paying off.
I was afraid that I would continue working hard 65 hours a week and still never be able to afford to buy my own house, because the work I chose to do wasn’t considered valuable enough.
I was afraid that I would live in a country that the rest of the world would never be able to respect.
I was afraid that my friends would be sent to Iraq, and then, after they were, I was afraid that those who had made it home safely would be called back over to serve again, and lose their lives as payment for their sacrifice.
I was afraid that someday, when I was ready to have kids, they would grow up in a world where evolution was no longer taught in schools. That they would still be taught to judge their friends on their color, their religion, their gender, their parents’ income. That in the world that my children grew up in, a Barack Obama would still not exist.
And regardless of my children; think about my parents. My parents, who taught me to be concerned with equality and justice. My dad, who went to college in clouds of tear gas and police wearing riot gear, so that I could live in a world where my education was valued just as much as the man’s next to me, so that the Latin American politicians that he studied would someday be regarded as just as important as their white counterparts, who taught me that “lesbian” was not a dirty word. My mother, who was disappointed when I loved Barbies more than toy trucks because her generation had worked so hard to ensure that it was okay to love toy trucks. My parents, who stood next to me at an Obama rally last winter and said “Yes we can,” louder than I ever did, despite more disillusionment than I ever could have claimed–I was so afraid of leaving my parents in a world where color or gender or sexuality mattered more than who you were and what you achieved.
I understand. I was scared too.
*
“And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West . . . we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America’s story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea – Yes. We. Can.”
- Barack Obama
