Out Of Many, We Are One: Yes We Can

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. In fact, I didn’t want to sleep. Sleeping meant that the last eight hours or so would have been a dream. A dream I would wake up from, feeling hopeless, frustrated and more or less how I had been feeling for the last eight years.

But it wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t a dream at all.

I stood in front of the television, because I couldn’t bare to sit, with my hands over my mouth and my eyes filling with tears. I watched everyone, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, bi-racial, Middle Eastern, Jewish and beyond feeling the same elation I was feeling. With tears in their eyes, they jumped for joy, hugged each other and crowded the streets. They stopped their cars and cheered and prayed and beamed smiles that ran from ear to ear.

Around the world, people were ecstatic, as if they were saying, this isn’t just about America, it’s about the world, and we won! We all won! At Obama’s former school in Jakarta, Indonesia, children held up photos of him and cheered, Kenya declared a national holiday for him. In New Delhi, India, a man was photographed kissing a cardboard cutout of Obama in utter joy. In Sydney, in Athens, Jersualem, Iraq and Senegal, people cried, threw up their arms and celebrated.

Online, the more I read, the more I couldn’t stop smiling. Everywhere I turned, people were writing how “proud they were to be an American again” and that they “kept bursting into tears” and feeling “unbelievably relieved and hopeful.” My sister even commented that she felt she had reached Nirvana. Overwhelmed with joy would be an understatement.

Still, there were some who were blinded by hate, ignorance and bigotry and horribly false statements.

My sister, my father and my mother, all stood and sat by me, smiling, shouting, loving every minute of it. And as I looked at them, and looked back at the people I was seeing all over the world, I got goosebumps. Some 12 hours later, the goosebumps haven’t stopped. I heard Martin Luther King in the distance, and wanted to tell him, look - we did it. Can you see? Can you see all these people not only in the U.S but around the world that came together? Can you see all the people that went to the polls and finally put their foot down and decided that a man was no longer going to be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And oh boy, what a character.

What a man of character.

I wasn’t born in this country. Neither were my parents. We came here for a better life and to escape persecution and war. My parents uprooted their lives and moved from everything they knew to Los Angeles so that my sister and I would have the opportunities they never had. So that we wouldn’t live in fear of our house being bombed over night, so that we could wear whatever we wanted to, whenever we wanted to, without being punished, so that we could have a great education and make something of ourselves. My parents, like the millions of people that inhabit this country, came to this country with one thing in mind: hope.

Over the last eight years, all that hope was lost and forgotten, because of a selfish administration who drove this country and the world into the ground. Because of a bunch of white men in suits who were ignorant and bigoted and horribly unintelligent. There is so much more I can say about Bush and his administration. I have so much anger for how they conducted this country’s affairs. But I wont say any of it here. Because it’s been said before, and today is not about looking backward, it’s about going forward.

It’s about how, last night this country came together and made our dreams one (and won!)

As I woke up yesterday morning, the electricity in my house had gone out again. I hoped this wasn’t foreshadowing what was about to come. I got dressed in the dark and along with my entire family, made my way down to our designated polling place, which happened to be my former elementary school.

It’s funny, when you’re a kid, everything seems so big and daunting. Whenever we would pile into the auditorium that I was standing in as a now 23-year-old woman, I would get a bit nervous. The big wooden chairs, the podium, the humongous stage - it was all so scary. More than a dozen years later, it wasn’t all that big after all.

We stood in line, along with the others who had braved waking up early to cast their vote. As I looked around, I tried to decipher who people might be voting for based on their appearance - an awful game, I know.

I started the game, but felt that I couldn’t finish. For the first time, I couldn’t decipher anything based on the old “judging a book by its cover” moniker. Every color, every ethnicity and age were ever present in that little auditorium meant for school plays and announcements. People of every profession and religion were casting their votes. It was perhaps there that it hit me. In the immortal words of Sam Cooke, I thought, dear God, a change is gonna come! A change is gonna come. A change has come.

The rest of the day was a blur. A very big blur that included listening to NPR, watching the BBC and refreshing the NY Times and CNN homepages every five minutes. I did stop at the supermarket on my way home, to pick up some supplies to make Obama cookies with, but as I walked through the door, I heard Wolf Blitzer on CNN exclaim, “CNN can now project that Senator Obama is the next president of the United States of America.”

As I write this, I feel so much like i did when I walked through the door. My eyes have welled up with tears just thinking about it. To think that this country, that started out with roots deep in slavery, as elected not only an African-American for president, but an AMAZING one at that, well, suffice it to say that I feel so proud. I feel so very proud of my country. I feel so very proud that they elected a man who spoke from his heart, who wants to see this country change, who wants America’s people, big, short, tall and small to have equal opportunities and benefits. I feel so proud knowing that jobs will be created, the environment wont suffer, this financial crisis will be lessened and limitations are GONE.

Barack Obama, I feel so humbled and proud and teary-eyed to call you my president. You told us, YES WE CAN, and you know what? YES WE DID. We really, really did.

The next four years are going to be tough. There are wars to finish, economic hardships to solve and a people to unite. The road to change is long and hard and will be paved with discrimination, hate and bigotry. But we’ll survive. We’ll soldier on and change people. Just look all around you, we already have.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

First photo by Bob Jagendorf, the rest by yours truly.