Archive for November 5th, 2008

I am not so ancient as the lady whose story Obama told last night as he accepted his win.  But I have seen some things that destroyed the image my childhood reading had built….the image of the America Jefferson, Washington, and Adams envisioned and engendered.

I was born the year America oversaw the murder of a democratically elected prime minister in Iran…so we could put a puppet Shah on the throne.  I would not learn of that until doing high school research.

As a little girl, I huddled in a school stairwell in Germany, listening to frightened whispers around me and seeing my teacher with tears on her face.  There was a wall being built around Berlin…..and later, in those stairwells again because there were missiles in Cuba.

A bit older, I ran down another school hallway in Texas, weeping on my way to an early bus ride home.  President Kennedy was dead.  And on the television later, pictures of his newly widowed wife made people say “Oh, doesn’t she look sad.”  I recall looking at her in her blood-stained pink suit and thinking, “No, she looks mad.”  But that is when women didn’t get mad in public.

Not very much older, in Louisiana, I rode a schoolbus in torrential rain as a hurricane hit the coastline far away.  Beside us at a traffic light was an open pick-up truck full of black children my age.  I got laughed at when I indignantly asked why there were there getting wet.  That pickup truck, it seems, was their “separate but equal” schoolbus.  That is my first memory of deep personal shame that corroded me so totally I was literally sorry to exist.  I was eleven years old.

And then, more funerals.  Bobby Kennedy dead on a kitchen floor.  Martin Luther King shot down after being harrassed by the FBI instead of protected by them from racists and murderers.

The tearing, bleeding wound of Viet Nam, ripping my country apart.   The lies and deceptions of the Nixon years, as I joined the Army at the very end of the Viet Nam years….and the shock of looking over the Berlin Wall that had been built in my childhood.

Well, I got to see a man walk on the moon.  I got to see the Berlin Wall fall in shards and tangles of barbed wire. I hoped then for a new era to begin.  And those hopes shattered.

I got to see a disgraceful war bleeding America literally and financially while oil companies and mercenaries banked profits.  I got to see the Constitution ignored and ridiculed. I got to see questionable elections let stand.  I saw my country engage in and justify torture.

And now, now I have seen a black man elected President as America stumbles in exhaustion and disarray.  It is a leap of hope and faith in ourselves.  I am again proud that we can attempt to regain what we have always aspired to be —it has NOT been beat out of us.  I can die more peaceful than ever before in my life now….if such were demanded of me right now.

My soul feels a freedom it thought gone forever.  My heart sings again, the music of life is not dead!   We may have sunk low, we may have to crawl before we can again walk and run….but we are reborn!