Change
I was 18 for six months when the towers fell. I had been sheltered or had been too self-involved to have noticed the problems of the world. I had never heard of Osama bin Laden. I thought I was a Republican. I thought Republican stood for small government, and individual liberty. My parents were Republican, and were the smartest people I knew (still are).
I met my husband 3 weeks before September 11th. He had recently left the Navy, and was an avid news-watcher. Over the next years I learned much of what my country had to offer. I learned that the party I thought I supported wanted to take away my rights. They wanted to deny my right to be sovereign over my own body. They wanted to deny my right to an abortion. Not only that, they wanted to deny my right to prevent having to get an abortion. They thought sex was dirty, and women (not men) who had it were dirtier. They actively fought for laws that would place the life of the unformed fetus in my body over my own life, over my own health. They thought that freedom of religion meant freedom to impose their religion upon all. They lied about everything. They tried to turn the constitution of our beloved country into a dictionary, to define words like "marriage".
My family was poor, but I quickly learned that the majority of America was much, much more poor. I was not raised to be a racist. What I knew or saw of racism in my youth came from textbooks describing the civil rights movement and Jim Crow laws. These were things that had occured decades before my life began and seemed to me like settled issues. Such is my privilege as a white person in this country. I learned that the reasons that black people were poor and had many criminals had less to do with lack of ambition, and more to do with 200 years of discrimination and hatred, that still persisted in the 21st century. And those who shared my background could not see it. I saw a people that I had never thought of as separate from my people cry for a leader, cry for a Martin Luther King who could restore their hope, who could guide us all to creating a better life.
Year afer year, I saw the rights and the country that I thought I knew turn into something I did not want to be a part of. They threw out haebus corpus like it was day old bread. They promoted women-hating, poor-hating, minority-hating, gay-hating. They used fear and hatred to win elections, to declare war. They turned our country, our own states, the United States, into "red" and "blue", into "us" and "them". To say I was disillusioned is an understatement.
In 2004, I watched the Republican and Democratic conventions on the television. The Democratic convention had a keynote speaker from Illinois, a junior Senator. His speech alone made me want to vote for John Kerry. After the program, I turned to my husband and said "That man should run for president".
Now, four years later, after Katrina showed the glaring indifference my country had for the black and the poor, that junior Senator has become our President. And he has restored the faith I had lost in my country. It is the kind of faith and patriotism that I felt as a child celebrating Independence Day. A faith and patriotism that I thought must have been a childs dream, because all of my adult life my country had been divided and hopeless. On November 4th, 2008, I saw a quarter of a million people of every color and background gathered in a park named after a Civil War general, crying and waiving flags in hope and prayer for a chance at the country we thought we should have.
Barack Obama is the leader we have been crying out for. He is the pivotal character that will define this generation. He, one man, is a symbol of hope to a generation, my generation, that had all but lost it. My heart sings that my country has a chance to change.