Yes Hirp Can

I thought it would be best to wait a day, before I posted anything about the election. I wanted to let everything really set in, and anyway, I commented either via Twitter or Facebook every 18 minutes on Election Night. The thing that has had the greatest impact on me, actually wasn’t President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech. But lets just start rewriting the book on great speakers now, the Obama needs to be in one of the first three or four chapters. What really moved me was the clips of the spontaneous celebrations both in our country and abroad. It’s not that I thought, “we’ll never see the world celebrate one of our elections,” it’s that I never would have considered that even a possibility.

And I’ve heard friends comment on post-election celebrations we’ve seen on the news in the past. We couldn’t understand how an election could inspire them to party in the streets. A sports franchise winning the final game of their season, which results in little more than the players getting new rings and the arenas or stadiums getting new flags, well celebrating that makes sense. Hell, in America, we’ll even tear down a city in celebration of such an accomplishment. But celebrate an election? Never.

Well that’s just one of many things that changed on November 4, 2008. There are three national events of my lifetime, that I know I’ll remember for the rest of my days. The first was the tragedy of the Challenger disaster. I remember where I was sitting and exactly how I heard about it. If I say third grade, it might make a few readers feel, well, a little more chronologically advanced. The second was 9/11/01. I now have #3 in the memory bank, thankfully and finally, it’s something positive. The day America grew up.

I don’t, for one second, believe this mean’s everything is right with America now. Race is still, and will always be an issue. Just as sex, class and religion. These things aren’t going away, but perhaps we’re back on the right path of facing these permanent obstacles. I’m no historian, but my gut tells me that after the combination of the Kennedy’s, Dr. King, John Lennon and Malcolm X being assassinated, and the Vietnam War finally ended, I think American’s became too exhausted to care enough. What was the point of caring, if it was just going to result in yet another crushing disappointment? We got to the 80’s, and we began to care just about our own worlds even more. Greed was good, and the sentiment trickled down.

The 90’s came, and soon the internet began making it easy to stay in touch, but not to really communicate. We had a new community, but it was and is still largely, a faceless one. We retreated even deeper in to our closets. The world saw genocide, terrorist attacks, diseases, poverty and famine. And we only bonded long enough for a telethon, benefit concert and to raise funds for our military. Oh, and we would print some clever t-shirts and bumper stickers. Then it was back to soccer games, e-mails, SUV’s and iPods. The only thing that came close to inspiring us was a few good movies, and even those were increasingly infrequent.

Then there was a candidate, and people began to stir. He had something we’d seen before, but not in a long time. I think it took the economy sinking as it did to finally scare people out of their little worlds, and realize it was time. Could we change, and make it back? Yes we can.

It still bothers me that we call Barack Obama an African-American, I think doing so is racist. Why is a man that has one Caucasian parent and one African-American parent, automatically labeled an African-American? When we get past that, when we no longer make an issue out of how blacks are voting for this candidate, or women vote for this candidate just because the candidates are either of the same shade or have the pee out of the same thing, that’s when we’ll have made serious progress. Obama doesn’t tell me that we did it, only that Yes We Can. It’s been a long time since we thought we could, it feels good.