Tonight
Today, I type this on a borrowed computer in a studio appartment in Chicago, Illinois. Tonight, I go to witness what may possibly be one of the most important days in the history of the United States of America.
Rowan managed to get a ticket to Obama's election night rally in Grant Park up here. We will be amongst the 70,000 or so that will have seats and the opportunity to buy pizza and hot chocolate while many others, and the guesstimates have run from around 100,000 total to over a million, will be outside the 'priviliged' area. Security is tight, very tight, so the lower estimate is likely to be the case as the leaders of this city have to face the possibility that the unthinkably wrong could happen as well as the unimaginably wild celebration that is more likley to occur both require protection at and from.
What happened in Chicago in 1968, even though it is forty years ago, is fresh in their minds; as well it should be.
However, other things that happened in the 60's, and 50's and earlier this century, the century before and centuries prior to that all reach, perhaps not a culmination, but another wondrous milestone in the journey of any one group of people to have a say in how they should live since that journey has begun.
Tonight a man will be elected the next President of the United States. Tonight, history will happen. Tonight, regardless of whether you might have the opportunity to sit on a folding chair in a softball field in downtown Chicago, at a bar, at your home, at your friends' homes, in this country or another one, chances are very good you will be watching the outcome with an anticipation or worry for the outcome. Tonight, I hope that a man of mixed ethnicity, a man of common birth and middle class privilege, who put himself through college and chose to continue the hard road of public service over the more common path of self-interest will stand on a podium on a hastily erected stage and be struck speechless for a few moments before he thanks us.
All of us. Those who voted for him. Those who did not. All of us who voted, today, or days or perhaps even weeks before, and proved our own value in showing the world that not only does Democracy work, that the American Dream is as limitless as we've always imagined it to be.
Tonight, I pray, the path that started with Quakers and capitalists and convicts and continued with slaves and abolitionists and then with civil rights activists and activists whose message needed to be heard even if their methods created more fear than hope, but was necessary all the same, and will continue for long, long after my death, will have a point that people can look back and say, "Here. This is the moment, this as the time, when anyone, anywhere, given the drive and chance of opportunity, can become anything, anything at all, they choose to make of themselves."
Tonight, it doesn't start. Tonight, it simply continues along the road.
But, oh, boy! What a milestone!
Thank you all for putting up with my rambling.
Rowan managed to get a ticket to Obama's election night rally in Grant Park up here. We will be amongst the 70,000 or so that will have seats and the opportunity to buy pizza and hot chocolate while many others, and the guesstimates have run from around 100,000 total to over a million, will be outside the 'priviliged' area. Security is tight, very tight, so the lower estimate is likely to be the case as the leaders of this city have to face the possibility that the unthinkably wrong could happen as well as the unimaginably wild celebration that is more likley to occur both require protection at and from.
What happened in Chicago in 1968, even though it is forty years ago, is fresh in their minds; as well it should be.
However, other things that happened in the 60's, and 50's and earlier this century, the century before and centuries prior to that all reach, perhaps not a culmination, but another wondrous milestone in the journey of any one group of people to have a say in how they should live since that journey has begun.
Tonight a man will be elected the next President of the United States. Tonight, history will happen. Tonight, regardless of whether you might have the opportunity to sit on a folding chair in a softball field in downtown Chicago, at a bar, at your home, at your friends' homes, in this country or another one, chances are very good you will be watching the outcome with an anticipation or worry for the outcome. Tonight, I hope that a man of mixed ethnicity, a man of common birth and middle class privilege, who put himself through college and chose to continue the hard road of public service over the more common path of self-interest will stand on a podium on a hastily erected stage and be struck speechless for a few moments before he thanks us.
All of us. Those who voted for him. Those who did not. All of us who voted, today, or days or perhaps even weeks before, and proved our own value in showing the world that not only does Democracy work, that the American Dream is as limitless as we've always imagined it to be.
Tonight, I pray, the path that started with Quakers and capitalists and convicts and continued with slaves and abolitionists and then with civil rights activists and activists whose message needed to be heard even if their methods created more fear than hope, but was necessary all the same, and will continue for long, long after my death, will have a point that people can look back and say, "Here. This is the moment, this as the time, when anyone, anywhere, given the drive and chance of opportunity, can become anything, anything at all, they choose to make of themselves."
Tonight, it doesn't start. Tonight, it simply continues along the road.
But, oh, boy! What a milestone!
Thank you all for putting up with my rambling.