some thoughts on obama

I know its been a while since I blogged, and truthfully, not much has happened. We were in Minneapolis last weekend visiting some friends and Matt had to work this past Thursday so I just ran about a million errands. Pretty lame.

But I wanted talk for a minute about what happened last week. This is not a political blog post. This is not about Right or Left, Red or Blue. This is about what I felt on Tuesday Nov. 4.
I wasn't thinking much about the implications of the day, to be quite honest. We had already voted a couple of weeks ago, so there would be no long line for me to stand in. I was more concerned with being deathly slow at work really. But when I got up and I got on the ol' internets, I began looking at the photographs. The pictures of the lines. And the pictures of the people in the lines. And the pictures of people shedding tears. They shed tears, because here they were, voting for a black man to be the president of the United States of America. And they never thought that day would come. And it made me cry too. In the ugliness of the last two months of this race, I guess I forgot what this would mean. It means that in this time, in this moment, a black man was given a job that no black man has ever been given before because we as a country felt that he was the right man for the job. It wasn't just black people and young people that elected Obama. It was blue collar people and it was rural people, city folk and country folk, Americans who maybe had to put their inner voice aside to do what they never thought they'd do. Vote for a black man as the President of the United States of America.
And I thought about what this means to me. Next year (hopefully) Matt and I are going to welcome a child into our lives. And this child will be black. And I will be able to say to him or her, when you were born, and when you came to this country, the President of the United States resembled you. And that means something to me.
I don't deify President-Elect Obama. I do not think he is a perfect man. He has a lot of work to do and many promises have been made. As Matt says, it starts now. Let's see what he can do.
I had an interesting conversation with a client the other day. A very nice man visiting from Fort Worth, TX. He said to me, well, he wasn't my guy, but he's my guy now. It gave me just a little bit of hope that this country does not have to be so divided, that we don't have to bow down to the politics of fear.
Maybe, when my children are adults, this won't seem so novel. I don't know. Racism isn't in danger of disappearing overnight or anytime soon. But I guess I am just a little more hopeful now. And that is what November 4, 2008 meant to me.