Still Buoyant: Thoughts on MY President
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November 23, 2008
Upper West Side, NYC
I’m still awed and astounded. Riding with the momentum, still soaking in the buoyancy this election has instilled in me. Sure, the elections have been over for weeks now, and perhaps I can now be qualified under the “elections withdrawal syndrome”, but I still can’t stop watching my president. MY president (!). This is the first time I have ever claimed, have ever been personally invested, have ever cared enough about a politician to attached the word “my” in front of their title.
Dare I say, for the first time, I’m proud to be an American.
More than ever, hope has been thriving within me since Barack Obama became our country’s 44th president. His tenets of hope and change are not only applicable to the greater scope of this country and the world as a whole, but resonates deep in me, echoed in my own personal struggles and in my own quest for liberation.
What a surreal and unusual case in point, is it not? A government and a presidency I’ve learned never to trust has suddenly given me hope, a kind of hope that inspires me to free myself from myself? Have we really entered a new era where some kind of freedom is in fact, plausible?
Hope and Change. As the eve of this New Year dawned, my friends and I exchanged CDs of personal playlists as gifts to each other to welcome in 2008. Unbeknownst to any of us, almost every CD offered a different version of Sam Cooke’s infamous “Change Gon’ Come”. I knew somehow, after noticing the synchronicity of what we all seemed to be channeling, that change was indeed on its way.
On a personal front, my own ideals of hope and change over the past few years have worn and tattered amidst the debris of emotional baggage, disappointment, and a seemingly long and weighted list of frustration and regrets. As a defense mechanism, I learned to expect the worse and accept the mediocre. I lived with a heart that housed a greater sense of fear than trust.
But this, this historical moment of electing our first Black President, offers me an overwhelming feeling of joy, of excitement, a reinvigoration and liberation (or at least a start it) of a heart that had gotten so used to clenching in forced resistance.
I am aware the world is not perfect, nor do I bet that it ever will be. There is still a long way to go, prop 8 measures to be shattered, injustices that will remain in existence, prejudices that won’t be solved or faded overnight. But if any one of you feel the same sort of revived inspiration that I do, we may just be at the dawn of a new renaissance.
Driving from Boston, I saw this poster that read: THIS DAY, WE PROVE THAT HOPE CAN TRIUMPH OVER FEAR.
YES I CAN.
I can’t account for the rest of the world, but one thing is for sure: there’s a new life in this heart.
Now let’s get to work.
Love,
Ruby
