Wherein Geoff smiles from awe
Michelle Obama is speaking today at the Civic Center, which I pass on my way to work. Driving by today was...a marvel. There was a line that went from the main doors, suspended thirty feet above the parking lot, through the lot itself and around the building. Driving the two blocks past it to work, I saw dozens of people of all ages, races, and colors making their way to join the line. Walking to hear the black woman who, if current trends continue, will be our next First Lady, speak.
Walking to support a man who served both as the president of the Harvard Law Review and as a community organizer in Southside Chicago...who somehow managed to make his way through the tangled web of a multiracial identity and race-based politics to become...what he is today. A man who stirs such feelings of hope and wonder and relief in me that I tear up just passing the building where his wife will sepak.
For so long, we've let the worst of us make the decisions. We've needed a President who was "just like us," who didn't challenge the way we thought about ourselves or others, who played into our need to locate an "other" to blame.
UWF is currently mounting a production of Miller's The Crucible. The director, who's proudly a flaming California liberal (although born in Nevada), flashed facts from today, from the era of the McCarthy trials, and then from the circumstances of the play to link our current era with both the time of the play's writing and its setting. I wasn't a huge fan of the particular pieces he chose to highlight - I think Sami Al-Arian's persecution is a better tie to Miller's thesis than the fact that we're still in Iraq and bin Laden's still at large, for instance - but the more I think about it, the more it feels like the right play at the right time.
I'm so proud of my country right now, and so very, very scared. We've had almost thirty years of "Me First," of pointing the finger of blame with one hand while grabbing all we can with the other. We've needed to feel comforted that we were always right, even when we weren't, that our basest fears and worries were justification for war and for keeping basic human rights out of the reach of so many...and it feels like we're waking up. It feels like we're looking at ourselves for the solution, for a real, well-thought-out, solution, It feels like the days of empty grandstanding are, if not over, then at least diminished.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not lionizing Barack Obama. I don't believe he, or any man - and certainly not any politician - in our current world is a candidate for sainthood. But our President was always set up as a working figurehead, a symbol. The personification of the direction the nation wanted to go. And I am so very, very proud to be part of an America that has chosen him as our symbol.
Walking to support a man who served both as the president of the Harvard Law Review and as a community organizer in Southside Chicago...who somehow managed to make his way through the tangled web of a multiracial identity and race-based politics to become...what he is today. A man who stirs such feelings of hope and wonder and relief in me that I tear up just passing the building where his wife will sepak.
For so long, we've let the worst of us make the decisions. We've needed a President who was "just like us," who didn't challenge the way we thought about ourselves or others, who played into our need to locate an "other" to blame.
UWF is currently mounting a production of Miller's The Crucible. The director, who's proudly a flaming California liberal (although born in Nevada), flashed facts from today, from the era of the McCarthy trials, and then from the circumstances of the play to link our current era with both the time of the play's writing and its setting. I wasn't a huge fan of the particular pieces he chose to highlight - I think Sami Al-Arian's persecution is a better tie to Miller's thesis than the fact that we're still in Iraq and bin Laden's still at large, for instance - but the more I think about it, the more it feels like the right play at the right time.
I'm so proud of my country right now, and so very, very scared. We've had almost thirty years of "Me First," of pointing the finger of blame with one hand while grabbing all we can with the other. We've needed to feel comforted that we were always right, even when we weren't, that our basest fears and worries were justification for war and for keeping basic human rights out of the reach of so many...and it feels like we're waking up. It feels like we're looking at ourselves for the solution, for a real, well-thought-out, solution, It feels like the days of empty grandstanding are, if not over, then at least diminished.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not lionizing Barack Obama. I don't believe he, or any man - and certainly not any politician - in our current world is a candidate for sainthood. But our President was always set up as a working figurehead, a symbol. The personification of the direction the nation wanted to go. And I am so very, very proud to be part of an America that has chosen him as our symbol.