Thursday, February 28, 2008

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

In my senior year of high school, my school held a luncheon and awards ceremony in the cafeteria for graduating seniors. At the ceremony, one of my classmates sang "Imagine" by, well, you know who sang it first. It was a beautiful rendition, none of us had known we had such a gem among our graduating class, and by the end our eyes were filled with tears, our hearts swelled with joy for having reached this milestone and with hope for the exciting, unknowable future ahead. The year was 1992, just before Bill's first term in office. When he began campaigning, he was popular among many of us, including most of my friends, we found him personable, likable -- he seemed to offer us new alternatives - he seemed to care about some of the things we were taught to care about, having been raised on Sesame Street and occasionally lucky enough to have teachers still in touch with their hippie ideals: the environment, technology, education, human rights, a concern for the welfare of human beings the world over. I remember having favorable discussions about him, well into my college years. We were hopeful, we believed in the future he promised us. And for the most part, I think he did a damn fine job. As for NAFTA, well, nobody's perfect.

Unfortunately, the administration of the current Commander-in-Chief has cast a long and dark shadow over any of the progress made by the Clinton years. During the past seven years, we have been thrown into a dark age. I have hardly been able to turn on the radio or the news because of the reports from Iraq. I could hardly believe the things I was hearing from my fellow Americans. I began to lose all hope.

And then, when I began to fear all was lost, when I started signing up for language courses to go live in another country, I began to hear whispers of a name through the grassroots organizations; I began seeing this name in association with worthy causes, I began seeing this person in YouTube videos talking about these causes. I've watched this campaign grow and gain strength and momentum. The leftists are worried he's too soft, too much of a dreamer, that the Republicans are going to "chew him up." Well, maybe that's how it is, but I think it's going to take a dreamer to yank us out of the muck of the past so that we are no longer stuck in tradition.

A friend of mine had one of those quotes as the electronic signature for her email. I'm butchering the hell out of it, but the gist of it was that it is more dangerous to cling to old ideas than to take a risk on new ones. I see Obama representing these new ideas - scary, risky - in the way that change always is, but for the first time in a long time, I have hope.

Friday night, midnight, laying in my bed, I could hear the tail end of the Obama rally 17 blocks away at the corner of 11th and Lavaca. The crowd cheered, fireworks burst, a booming voice over a loudspeaker, which may have been Obama's, drifted up into the chilly, starry night. And circulating within that rally, drifting down the streets and into the night, I could hear it - a battle cry, a call for change, a rhythmic, chanting heartbeat: "yes we can! yes we can! yes we can!"

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