I wasn't especially surprised to read about the pair of skinheads arrested for plotting to kill Senator Obama the other day. Everyone, especially black Democrats like me, has known that as much as his candidacy sparked exuberance in us, it would also unleash an inchoate hatred in others. I have been prepared for this and know that just as we control our fears and rationally combat foreign terrorists, these domestic terrorists will also have to be aggressively and relentlessly infiltrated, disrupted and destroyed.
What has shocked me, however, is how nervous I am about the junior Senator from Illinois actually succeeding.
Waiting for election night this year is like being a kid waiting for Christmas Day. You've been lobbying your parents for a new bicycle since school started but their responses have always been annoyingly coy. To make matters worse your dad came home a few days earlier with something in the back of the station wagon, but when you stepped outside to take a look he yelled at you to hurry back in. Next thing you know, for the entire week before Christmas, you've been forbidden to enter the garage.
You're pretty positive that the new ten-speed is your big gift this Christmas. You can almost smell the new seat. However the Charlie Brown in you can more easily imagine being crushed and permanently scarred by disappointment than relieved and elated by satisfaction.
Barring some extraordinary event this week, sometime in the evening on November 4th, Barack Obama will go from being the Democratic nominee to the President-elect of the United States of America.
If you think that I'll finally breath easier you misunderestimate -- in the words of Obama's predecessor -- the depths of my neuroses.
If you're at all like me and think these next few days are torture, just imagine how interminable the next almost three months before his inauguration will feel? Sure, I'll celebrate election night if Obama wins, but I know that I won't really believe it until noon on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009. I picture it as a brilliantly blue, unseasonably, globally, warm day when Chief Justice Roberts will ask Obama to raise his right hand and repeat after him: "I solemnly swear to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
I think between now and that moment I will set the world record for breaths held.
"What a long, strange trip it's been." I'm just a year younger than Obama and when I was a kid daydreaming about the 21st century I imagined people zipping to work with personal jetpacks, levitating cars and ninety-year-olds looking like twenty-year-olds in his and hers spandex jumpsuits. I imagined x-wing starfighters and demolecularizing transporters and phasers I could set to stun.
What I never imagined was a black President. On Star Trek, yes the world was multi-racial, but Kirk was still king.
These almost two years of the Obama candidacy rewrote the book. Barack Obama is the Seabiscuit of our generation. The absurd long shot who reminds us of the power of even our most ridiculous dreams.
I'm a patriot. Since I was a child I have always loved my country. But if Obama really does win, then I think I will feel -- perhaps for the first time -- that my country loves me back.
My partner and I were canvassing for Obama in a North Carolina neighborhood, and I was taken by the responses from the African American households, who opened their doors to see a white couple, with Obama T-shirts, buttons and brochures.
It wasn't their words, but their facial expressions, and body language, that said it all......
It's about time!
"There appears to be a general apprehension in the country about the future. That apprehension undermines our faith in each other and our faith in ourselves -- undermines that confidence. The idea that America today will be better tomorrow has become destabilized. It has become destabilized because of the recession and the sluggishness of the economy... the American dream is not dead. It is not dead! It is gasping for breath, but it is not dead."
In 2004, we heard another keynote address at the DNC inspiring to many; Obama's speech about the American Dream. When he was finished, we KNEW. We understood. We got to peek into the future and see what might be:
"... Hope in the face of difficulty! Hope in the face of uncertainty! The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead."
Obama reminds us we are all part of something much bigger and much greater than ourselves and the chance that it could be taken/stolen/lost through the election is painful. We are on the precipice and we just want the release.
Anything can happen.
Over 2 years ago, I told my husband that our next president would be an Illinois senator named Barack Obama. He said it would never happen. That this country would never vote for a black man with a funny name.
Tonite I walked into my local Obama office to volunteer my time this weekend. The excitement was palpable. People were smiling and happy. The giddy energy was unlike anything I've ever felt when it comes to politics. After signing up for a shift, I walked back to my car and promptly began to cry. After reading this essay, I realize it is because I've been holding my breath, praying and wishing that our country has changed enough to elect a black man with a funny name who brings the promise of hope and change to our battered country. The thought that somehow, someone might steal this from me...from us...is almost too much to consider.
Sometimes the utter anger and hate that the HOPE that Barack represents takes my breath away. Everytime I see him stand up in front of a crowd, I hold my breath. I worry that one of those people who fear change and hope, will take the hope away from the rest of us.
So yes, I feel like I haven't taken a breath in months. And, like you, I know I will not fully exhale until January 20th.
May God protect us all.
I am much more anxious now that I know the consequences if we do not get what we hope for. I try to keep sane and pray for all of us, for our Nation.
I want someone to say to me on November 5, "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause"
Only then will I be able to exhale and then quickly inhale and wait until January 20th.
Racism is the 'snake' in this election...sad to say.