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I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to be the age I am now but to live in the United States during the year of 1968. Nowhere and no place in time was the death of a national identity and decades of ensuing strife more prevalent than during that one year. The madness of that one year was what caused the Weathermen to begin bombing buildings all over the United States. And if I had lived during that year, I probably would have joined them.
The year began with half a million kids shipped off to fight in Vietnam; half of them drafted, the majority pulled out of ghettos as attending University or having a “selective job” was a main source for deferment. By the end of January, the Tet offensive surprised American troops and bombarded them for nine months in half built forts surrounded by an unfamiliar jungle. On March 16th, five hundred civilians were shot and dumped into ditches for being communist sympathizers in My Lai. On April 4th, Martin Luther King was shot in the face after giving his “I've been around the mountain top” speech. On June 5th, Robert Kennedy was shot in the face after winning the California primary. On August 29th with clouds of tear gas still clouding the air, Hubert Humphrey wins the Democratic presidential nomination even though 80% of primary votes went towards anti-war candidates. On November 5th, facing an election against pro-segregationist George Wallace and war apologist Hubert Humphrey; Richard Nixon won the American election. The monthly average for troops killed in Vietnam rose from 770 in 1967 to 1200 and everything after that- as they say, is history.
The year of 1968 is in many ways like 2008: massive political realignment, a gruelling primary contest, an unending proxy war engulfing a generation, another war over an abstraction with social division and strife threatening to unravel an entire country. But rather than a vote out of fear, what we have here is a vote out of hope.
Now, I’m professional cynic at heart. I know Obama is just another politician; his vote on FISA, his half-hearted position on gay marriage, and his threats against Pakistan belies his moderate-to-deflect-criticism mindset over true independence. But when the history is so obvious and ridden with mistakes, it sometimes seems we are often doomed to repeat the same ones over and over.
Yet history cannot be denied. Forty-five years after segregation ended, forty-four years after the last restrictions on African-Americans voting ended, twenty years after Bush Sr’s Willie Horton ad, eighteen years after Jesse Helm’s Hands ad, and three years after Hurricane Katrina: Barack Obama has been elected President. And all it took was another endless war and economic catastrophe.
The Rolling Stone- in their usual over-the-top leftist way, made the argument that any rejection of Obama is nothing short of a rejection of black America itself. Having not embraced radicalism, having not been overly negative and blame “whitey” for all problems, having been at the top of his class at Harvard Law, the (first black) editor of the Harvard Law Review, and all done while pulling himself up from the bootstraps of a single-parent family; Obama has surpassed not only the expectations and demands of White America (nevermind how a white C minus student has been President for eight years) but proven the ability to build broad coalitions across racial, economic, and even ideological lines.
What the election in 1968 failed to do has finally been achieved. Where the argument of they “don’t think the way we do” has finally been put to rest. Obama won, that was expected. But by winning or at the very least getting 49% in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, and Virginia- four states that have rarely if ever went to the Democrats since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, has irrevocably altered the face of what we expect the American leader to be. Revealing the truth that for better or worst, we are bound together. Either in a warming embrace or in a clawing grip as the ones at bottom pulls the water closer to your head. The opportunity to end an unjust, senseless war fought by kids robbed of a future and to restore faith in a system tarnished by greed and corruption beyond scandal.
Yet as one peak towards societal harmony is reached, rather than the bar being lowered it is again raised. Proposition 8 in California- which sought not just to ban gay marriage but to nullify fifty-thousand existing marriages, has passed by the same margin that elected Barack Obama. Another referendum made adoption of abandoned children by gay couples illegal. A milestone was reached on November fourth yet more loom ahead and still we lack leaders, still we lack those chosen few to speak for the voiceless, those of the 80% who dare to protect the 20%.
We don’t know how Obama will stand the test of time but we do know of Presidents who signed their own political death sentence in pursuit of eliminating racism from our laws, we know of Presidents who order the military to guard terrified minority kids to school from angry hateful mobs, and we know of Presidents willing to unify their country to end an injustice at all costs. We can only hope that he’ll be worthy of them but then again, it has been a while since it’s been safe to hope.
So, here's a bottle of burgandy and a toast to you, 2009, whatever future you may hold.
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