Back in February when I was trying to decide between Clinton and Obama, one thing was clear: both would be better than what we have now, but during a Clinton presidency, I could sit back and return to my life.
An Obama presidency, however, would shake me out of my complacency and force me to get more involved.
It’s already happening. I’m tired, scared, and excited all at once.
First of all, let me confess, that I am playing this game on the sidelines. I have sent money when I can, sure, but I haven’t knocked on doors or made phone calls. Those activities will probably never be for me. It’s also true that I work full-time and have two very young kids (5 & 2). While others may be able to manage campaigning with a plate that full, I know when I’ve reached my limit, and believe me, I’m there.
At the same time, I can see the big changes that Barack has already wrought on the way that I communicate with my friends and neighbors, on how I think, parent, talk, and teach. And I’m so grateful for the ways in which new technologies let me participate in my own way.
Let me give you an example:
Yesterday, a friend in Seattle sent me a link to an article in the Brooklyn Rail. It’s a terrific essay by a young writer who happens to also have gone to my high school. I was really excited to read it, not least because he connects the feeling of possibility and power that is central to the culture of this inner city Seattle public school to Barack’s candidacy. He argues that part of what he admires about Obama comes out of Obama’s ability to stand in the midst of a racially diverse and occasionally tense community and call it to its highest self. Let me give you a taste of his essay:
In February of my freshman year, we had an assembly to honor Martin Luther King Day. It wasn’t very much different from previous assemblies held at my middle school: A black girl performed a soulful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner; a white boy gave a platitudinous speech about leadership or hard work, I can’t remember which. (There was one novelty, a troupe of Ethiopian girls who shook their asses so fast they managed to titillate the audience and inspire a sense of cultural appreciation all at once.) Then there was more singing, more dancing, more speeches.
I don’t remember exactly what it was about that day; but I do remember the feeling as I stood in the bleachers of the Garfield gym, this surge of emotion. It said—and we said back!—we are here, and we are different than what came before.
It said that we weren’t like our parents, or our parents’ parents—we weren’t subject to their prejudices or preconceptions. We weren’t connected to the America that practiced slavery and put people in internment camps, slaughtered Native Americans and tolerated the laws of Jim Crow.
It said that we have this power—awesome power—to make something new.
Such were my feelings in high school. Then I went to college, the first of three I would attend, and quickly received a remedial education in small-mindedness and unconscious bigotry.
I don’t quite know how to explain it any better. I am amazed and moved to think that the ethos of my Garfield persists. But he is utterly right: Barack’s Yes We Can! seems deeply, deeply familiar to me and I think it comes out of those assemblies in that old gym. And that, for me, is the best argument I know for strong, diverse public schools: they help a diverse world full of difference feel like home.
But my point was about community. Let me return to it.
I was really moved by the essay and wanted to share it, so I posted it to my Twitter page where a friend read it & wrote back to say she had been moved, too. I posted it to my facebook page and a high school friend thanked me. I posted it to my blog and a friend posted a thoughtful comment on the NYT article about reading in McCain’s family. Finally, I sent the link to five friends. One wrote back, promising to pass it on. Another wrote to tell me he found the essay mawkish.
I felt stung.
I suppose it is mawkish. I thought and thought about it and then I wrote back. Just a quick note to say that I thought mawkish was too easy, that I liked 23 y.o. idealism better than cynicism, and that it was heartening, in the face of McCain/Palin’s race-baiting to remember something so joyous and hopeful as this.
For me, that flurry of posting and forwarding and, most of all, that little reply, was something: a little contribution to my sense of responsibility as a citizen. I continue to be amazed at how Obama has awakened that.