Of course there's the snarkiness ('just another McCain beauty queen') as well as the justifiable questioning of her experience, but let's not lose sight of what this is: a female candidate placed on the ticket of the party which has traditionally remained opposed all things feminist.
Hooray for all our daughters...
Friday, August 29, 2008
Innocence
When Barack Obama walked onto the stage in Denver last night, he carried with him not only the remembrance of a speech given precisely 45 years earlier, but also its fulfillment. What Martin Luther King dreamed, in part, was the day when someone like Obama would become the 'every man' capable of being elected the leader of our country.
But as evocative as was that moment, and as transparent its ties to the birth of the modern civil rights movement, I found myself more strongly reminded not of the day when King rose on the mall in D.C., but the one when another king fell on the knoll in Dallas. One event imagined the end of racism. The other, less than 100 days later, marked the end of innocence.
Every day we pass some person who invisibly carries the indelible sadness of having lost a child. We can not see or feel it, but that does not reduce the devastation. If that individual grief were laid bare...and extended to soul of every American...we would relive the death of Kennedy. Even those who despised what he loved understood that in that solitary moment something had been taken which we could not retrieve--the idea that our nation was the exception to history, the place where governments weren't dissolved...or lives determined...at the barrel of a gun.
We then endured the longest week of our lives. Thanksgiving dinners were served, but the thanks we gave were muted. Stores closed, football games were cancelled, and as the funeral procession rolled across our television screens I shed my first tears of empathy watching John-John salute the passing of his departed father.
On the day when another shot felled King himself in Memphis, we were devastated again--but not quite as shocked. By the time a second Kennedy was taken by another gunman in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, America sighed, 'yep...I was afraid that was gonna happen'. We would never be innocent again.
Until last night.
My generation, forged in the crucible of race and rebellion and vanity and Vietnam, has never stopped fighting our wars. We have never resolved them. And in the process, we have finished the job of transforming our democracy into a tyranny of cynicism and self interest.
But Obama may turn our tide. He represents not only the personification of King's dream...but also the passing of the national torch to a new generation of dreamers.
May they put away our battles, and wage their own. May they come to presume King's vision of a nation where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
But most of all, in their own way, may they begin repairing our innocence.
But as evocative as was that moment, and as transparent its ties to the birth of the modern civil rights movement, I found myself more strongly reminded not of the day when King rose on the mall in D.C., but the one when another king fell on the knoll in Dallas. One event imagined the end of racism. The other, less than 100 days later, marked the end of innocence.
Every day we pass some person who invisibly carries the indelible sadness of having lost a child. We can not see or feel it, but that does not reduce the devastation. If that individual grief were laid bare...and extended to soul of every American...we would relive the death of Kennedy. Even those who despised what he loved understood that in that solitary moment something had been taken which we could not retrieve--the idea that our nation was the exception to history, the place where governments weren't dissolved...or lives determined...at the barrel of a gun.
We then endured the longest week of our lives. Thanksgiving dinners were served, but the thanks we gave were muted. Stores closed, football games were cancelled, and as the funeral procession rolled across our television screens I shed my first tears of empathy watching John-John salute the passing of his departed father.
On the day when another shot felled King himself in Memphis, we were devastated again--but not quite as shocked. By the time a second Kennedy was taken by another gunman in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, America sighed, 'yep...I was afraid that was gonna happen'. We would never be innocent again.
Until last night.
My generation, forged in the crucible of race and rebellion and vanity and Vietnam, has never stopped fighting our wars. We have never resolved them. And in the process, we have finished the job of transforming our democracy into a tyranny of cynicism and self interest.
But Obama may turn our tide. He represents not only the personification of King's dream...but also the passing of the national torch to a new generation of dreamers.
May they put away our battles, and wage their own. May they come to presume King's vision of a nation where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
But most of all, in their own way, may they begin repairing our innocence.
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