I wanted to sit down and write some epic thing about yesterday’s historic election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, how much it has changed me as a person in a short time. I wanted to try and express how I was touched by the moving images of Jesse Jackson with tears streaming down his face, of all those hopeful faces in Grant Park of all races and nationalities. I wanted to describe how going out in Memphis today, I could see the spring in some people’s step and the unconscionable bitterness on the faces of others.
What is most beautiful about who each of us is became a little brighter today, and what is ugliest about who each of us is became, simultaneously, magnified. I realized that while I should be proud and take pride in what has happened, I should refrain from reveling in this victory in a way that those who disagree with me have done in the past.
Reveling in our own successes as to rub it in the faces of others is what got us to the place where we are today. The amount of grace with which one accepts victory must be equal to that with which each of us deals with the challenge of defeat. It defines our character as individuals, how we behave in the shadow of changes yet to come.
This is the challenge of hope’s victory in this election. There are those who want to own this victory for their own selfish reasons. If it inspires us to see what is greatest within ourselves, I see nothing wrong with that. It is when it encourages us to embrace what is ugliest about our nature, the need to say and do things which would make us separate or apart from each other, that owning this victory in such a way becomes detrimental to us all.
I am enthusiastic in my exhaustion now. I am cried out. I am determined and focused. I see things with a clarity that I have not in quite some time. I want to capture this feeling and hang on to it forever, for all the days of my life. I want to encourage others to find that feeling within themselves.
Whatever seemed so impossible before now seems so possible. Whatever fear I may have seems so far away. My personal bon mot for many years has been (and those who know me well can testify to this) a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen.”
Let us heal and begin the work we have started.
