What A Country, What an Election

In my fifth decade of life, I thought very little could excite me. And I had not the vaguest idea that I would help make history. And I didn't even have to leave my house!

It's five in the morning and I'm experiencing the bad aspect of standard time. It won't be daylight for another two hours, but my body clock, used to a six a.m. wake up call, now gives me two hours of darkness. So I began to count my blessings. This is something I consciously do on a regular basis. It's probably the only way I survived the Bush years. It helps keep my world in perspective.

But my mind kept drifting to this historic election taking place today. And already in a count the blessings frame of mind, I began to think about my childhood, the part of the country in which I lived, and the incredible fact that I have already voted for an African American.

I grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Without giving a history lesson, suffice to say that my state has a checkered history when it comes to race relations. It was a border state in the civil war, which means it did not want to succeed from the union but also wanted to own slaves. Now, Missouri has progressed tremendously as of today, but when I was a child it was before the civil rights act and seperate but not equal was still the prevailing opinion.

And to think that when I was a young teen, there was a mixed race black kid growing up just a hundred or so miles away who was destined to become President of the United States of America! Man, if you would have told me that back then I would have tried to get away from you as quickly as possible, as I would have been sure you were crazy.

I was extremely lucky to have been born at the right time to allow me to live through the sixties. I have a vivid memory of purchasing my first record. A brand new tune called "You Ain't Nothing But A Hound Dog" by Elvis Presley. I was three years old at the time and liked the doggie song. A few years later I hunkered on the couch with my parents and watched the Cuban missile crises happen on television. And by the time the civil rights act was passed, I was a teenage idealist. And when the summer of love came along I had become a hippie. Chock full of hormones and ready to rebel at the drop of a feather. In 1969 I was given a draft card and we had put a man on the moon. Still, I would not have believed we would see an African American president in my lifetime. There was simply too much bigotry.

I watched an hour long interview last weekend on Book TV on C-SPAN with Studs Terkel. Studs said that Tom Brokaw may call the world war two generation the greatest, but in his opinion it was the sixties generation. His argument was that fighting Hitler was thrust on one generation while the other created numerous movements that carry on today. As I am of the sixties, I was proud of his comment.

I do believe we accomplished much when we were young. And what Studs said is true. We started the environmental movement, feminism, anti-war protests and civil disobedience, etc. We were a very progressive generation.

But the accomplishment of which I am most proud is in the area of civil rights. It was far from easy. The race riots of the sixties left so many scars on our national psyche. So many cities burned. People speak of our nation as divided, and much of that division ruminates from the sixties. We were so divided then that the president allowed our National Guard to fire on and kill students at Kent State. The FBI kept dossiers on students only because they disagreed with the current administration's policy. I often thought we were on the verge of another civil war.

But as often happens, time blunted the rage of the sixties. The hippies and rebels blended into society. But for the most part, we hung onto our values. Particularly our respect for our fellow man and our concept of equality among ethnic groups. Now, we are approaching retirement and our children are grown. And amazingly enough, our most important accomplishment just became apparent.

We imparted our race values to our children. I say this because their generation almost completely ignores race when measuring themselves against others. They really don't understand our amazement at the Barack Obama phenomena. They think nothing of voting for someone who looks different from them, it just doesn't cross their mind. This is our greatest accomplishment. That race as a factor breaks down almost completely by age. We are amazed, they are blase.

So I, and so many others, made history simply by raising children who are colorblind. And we did it in the comfort of our own homes.