November 5, 2008

Something Important Happened Tonight

He might be somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 years old. He is tall and lean and weathered and black, and he looks like he is right at home under the Virginia sun. He has been standing in line for two hours, with his equally weathered wife at his side, and he is still less than halfway through the line. He is calmly and happily waiting for his turn to vote.

The television reporter asks him how he feels, and a shy smile lights up his face as he opens his mouth to speak. But then his voice catches in his throat, and he has to cough and clear his throat and wipe the corner of his eye before he can answer. He looks at his wife, and says, “I never thought I’d see this day.”

I’m walking to work and a conservatively dressed white man in his 60s stops me to hand me a “Don’t Forget To Vote” door hanger. His haircut, polished shoes and wool jacket say “lawyer,” or maybe “accountant.” The logo on the door hanger he gives me says, “Barack Obama.”

The 125,000 people in Chicago’s Grant Park are cheering and chanting and celebrating the announcement that the election has been called in favor of Obama. Among all those radiant faces, mostly young, all ecstatic, a balding man, about my age, stands out because he is not smiling, or screaming, or jumping up and down. He is staring ahead in disbelief. He is simply overwhelmed.

Something important has happened.

I’ve been around for quite a few years. I listened to Dr. King tell us about his dream, and I wept when the forces of hatred and intolerance took him away from us. I listened to Bobby Kennedy plead for peace in the face of that overwhelming pain, and I wept again when those same dark forces took him.

I lived through LBJ, and hippies, and Vietnam, and Watergate, and race riots, and gas lines, and Reaganomics. I’ve spent my entire adult life in a country divided along cultural and ideological and racial lines. As America’s problems became more difficult over the past few years, I watched those lines deepen and harden, and I listened as political rhetoric seemed every day to turn more poisonous and hateful.

At first, this election campaign seemed to develop along those same lines. We saw grainy pictures of Barack Obama in a turban, and listened to robocalls that told us that he was a socialist and a terrorist. We heard people at rallies, whipped to a frenzy by the candidates, shout “Kill Him!” and “Terrorist!” and “Off With His Head!”

But then something happened. This time the American people rejected the divisiveness that served recent political campaigns so effectively. This time the people refused to retreat to fear and slogans. They rejected the dark suggestions that Barack Obama was somehow “other” and “dangerous.” Every time the McCain campaign turned up the negative volume – to the apparent discomfort of John McCain, a man I have deeply admired for many years – the polls stayed the same or moved in Obama’s favor.

And tonight, by an overwhelming margin, the people elected Barack Obama president of the United States of America.

I can’t say that President Obama will have the answers to all our problems, or even most of them. I do know that he has the intellectual capacity to explore and grasp them, the willingness to build teams to attack them, and the personal magnetism to inspire those teams to success.

Tonight Barack Obama gave his victory speech on a stage in Grant Park, ironically the same place where I first found out about tear gas during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. And as I listened to him I had to think that maybe we are seeing the end of the culture wars we have endured for so many years. He began by saying, “If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where all things are possible . . .”

Something important happened tonight.

Copyright ©2008 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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