44th President of the United States, Barack Obama
Ok people…it took me a couple months to speak, but this is the time. So settle in, this one will be a doozy.
What we have just witnessed tonight is nothing short of magical. And as a child of the south, I have a story to share.
We have just elected a black man to be the 44th President of the United States. Not in my lifetime did I ever expect this to happen, but I always had hope that it would. The way that this happened is the thing that gives me goose-bumps: both as a proud American, and as a black man.
As a native Virginian, born in 1961, I didn’t know that JFK had done the impossible at that time. I was too young. But I grew up in a time where the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy lifted the country–I only recognized it by his dreams of the space program witnessed posthumously at the ripe young age of 6. Watching men trying to reach the moon on the 19 inch black & white in my parents’ den gave me hope that we could be something more than what we were at the time.
“At the time.”
I was too young to remember what my parents knew too well. Oppression. Rights diminished in the face of a yearning for a life unshackled by the burdens of ignorance and lifted by those ideals of a president who dared to aim high. Not many saw the gravity of the Apollo program (no pun intended), but something clicked in me. My aspirations to be an astronaut were ridiculed by people close to me, marking it as a “white thing.”
My parents said “press on.” Understand what it takes, and do your best.
So I studied. Attending the “white school” instead of the “black school” after the walls broke down for segregation. Computers and science were my thing, still getting the razzing that I was bound to hit a brick wall. What I learned served me well, and all that self-taught knowledge I earned helped me rise up from where I was, not that I didn’t love my little slice of heaven.
But run the clock forward. I never achieved my goal of flying in zero-g, but I did find a way to grab a bigger slice of the pie than I ever would have by thinking small. And that knowledge has brought me so many wonders in the world that so many of my family have yet to behold. And I have shared so much of that world and my view of it with my children.
If my life were to have ended there, I would die satisfied. Happy in the minor achievements of a country boy who dared to dream a bit beyond the pig-pen.
But my story became Obama’s story tonight.
We don’t share anything, but yet we share so much. We share a view that the world is not bound by our limits, but opened by our ideals. That we can see the best in the people around us, and hope for a world where our own children will have a better chance to succeed or fail not on the basis of their color, but by the ideals that make America great: hard work, tenacity, sacrifice. I’m not sure I have done the best job instilling these ideals into my kids; I guess time will tell. But I do know that each day they wake up for the next four years, they will do so with the aspirations and dreams of being something better than what they think, by working a bit harder to achieve, and trying harder when the world looks down on them.
Because there are no excuses now.
An African American with a funny name just beat the two biggest political machines in the country with class, dignity, and more than anything, intelligence and geekiness. It proves a lot. The legacy of this night is what we all do with this victory as Americans who yearn for change. Shall we sit and complain about what needs to be done, or will we roll up our sleeves and show the world that we value the victory we’ve just achieved, forging a more perfect union for all citizens who call this land “home.”?
It’s up to us now.
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