(no subject)
Yesterday morning I staggered in and fell dead asleep.
I'd had about 4 or 5 hours sleep in two and a half days, and I spent all night with NPR and the BBC, and I listened, and I don't think I was processing. Because all my celebrating was, when I got out to my car from work, writing "WE WIN" in the melting frost on my back windshield, and staring at it until someone asked me if I was okay.
It wasn't until I was driving home, on the little back country two lane, and this radio show by these two idiots was coming on. They always start their broadcast with "Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." and the sun was just coming over the hills.
And it hit me. Not a savior or a revolution had come our way that night, but a saving grace and a renewal of hope had been brought by our hands. And I just felt like I broke open as the sun spilled down over the pastures, and I was too tired to deal with it, and so I laughed a lot and cried a little, all the rest of the way home.
Today I can say, it was all worth it. Even with Alabama red red red. Because 39% (from the data I saw) of Alabamians voted for Obama. And *that* was why I bothered to try, and to talk, and to persuade and argue and laugh at and with people I would cross the street to avoid, all these months, and why I bothered to cast a vote I knew would be useless to the cause.
I wanted to see that line in the paper. I wanted to see "A surprising X% of Alabamians voted for Obama." I wanted to be able to say, "Even if every single black person in the state voted for Obama, that leaves X% left, and those were people who got over themselves far enough to vote on the issues and not the colors." "Yes, that happened here."
I wanted to be able to say it to myself, to feel the hope of it, and to others, to share the hope of it.
Not "we won."
We win.
I'd had about 4 or 5 hours sleep in two and a half days, and I spent all night with NPR and the BBC, and I listened, and I don't think I was processing. Because all my celebrating was, when I got out to my car from work, writing "WE WIN" in the melting frost on my back windshield, and staring at it until someone asked me if I was okay.
It wasn't until I was driving home, on the little back country two lane, and this radio show by these two idiots was coming on. They always start their broadcast with "Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." and the sun was just coming over the hills.
And it hit me. Not a savior or a revolution had come our way that night, but a saving grace and a renewal of hope had been brought by our hands. And I just felt like I broke open as the sun spilled down over the pastures, and I was too tired to deal with it, and so I laughed a lot and cried a little, all the rest of the way home.
Today I can say, it was all worth it. Even with Alabama red red red. Because 39% (from the data I saw) of Alabamians voted for Obama. And *that* was why I bothered to try, and to talk, and to persuade and argue and laugh at and with people I would cross the street to avoid, all these months, and why I bothered to cast a vote I knew would be useless to the cause.
I wanted to see that line in the paper. I wanted to see "A surprising X% of Alabamians voted for Obama." I wanted to be able to say, "Even if every single black person in the state voted for Obama, that leaves X% left, and those were people who got over themselves far enough to vote on the issues and not the colors." "Yes, that happened here."
I wanted to be able to say it to myself, to feel the hope of it, and to others, to share the hope of it.
Not "we won."
We win.