Someone on my Livejournal friends-of-friends list uploaded that song and "Eyes On The Prize" in honor of today's election, which made me cry.
Keep your eyes on the prize
hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize
hold on.
("Eyes" is a prettier song but it was 6 mb and I can only upload up to 5 here.)
To put things in perspective, here are the other things that made me cry today. I cry easily, especially today for some reason.
- My friend Kat, a reporter in Schenectady, posting an essay about what it's like to vote when you're a journalist. 364 days a year, she says, we are not allowed an opinion, and must put our feelings into a little box and leave it on the shelf, and write objectively with no opinions, about politics, about everything. For one perfect moment, behind that curtain, I get to have a say. I get to have an opinion. And it gets to count.
- This article in the Christian Science Monitor.
My Wife Made Me Canvass For Obama. A man who voted for G.H.W. Bush twice and G.W.B. once gets dragged out by his wife, and learns something. I've learned that this election is about the heart of America. It's about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten.
- This poem by Seigfried Sassoon:
When you are standing at your hero's grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart's rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you'll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.
--Siegfried Sassoon
November 1918
- The sound of the lever-action voting machines, resounding in the elementary school gymnasium with a sudden swooshing clack as a vote was literally cast with a sweeping gesture of the voter's arm, finalizing those little choices each lever signified. It's such a profound noise. I didn't know I cared about it. I didn't know I'd recognize it. But I could hear it from down the hall, and it made me cry a little.
- This photo, referred to by Colin Powell when he criticized McCain's responses to Obama being a Muslim.
Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan.
Is he less of a patriot than you, Senator McCain, because he died of his wounds and you did not???? He was twenty fucking years old, and had been waiting since 9/11 to be old enough to join the Army so he could help.
I would have voted for you in 2000, Senator McCain, but you have squandered and squandered and squandered everything I believed in that you stood for since then. You make me sick now, you disingenous and sick, sick old man.
I admit. I was not a huge fan of Obama. I have known about him since '04, have had friends predicting his eventual ascendancy, and I looked into him a bit. I found him smug. I find many of his followers smug and virtually intolerable.
He is literally African-American, and has something that most of the so-called African-Americans in this country don't have: he got to go to Africa and see his father and grandfather's graves. Most black Americans have been here so long, many through decades of slavery, and most black American politicans rose up through the Civil Rights movement of the '60s. Obama didn't live in the US yet when MLK was shot. (My father was in the 1st Armored Division, which suppressed the riots in Chicago after this event. For whatever perspective that gives.)
I do find Obama to be occasionally smug. That crack about Hillary where he implied she was on the rag: I could have strangled him.
But I think it is important not to underestimate this. Most of the presidents we've had have come from a very select group. Most of them have been members of the same small denomination of Christians. I've always been cynical about the idea that "anyone could be President".
So the idea that the biracial son of a teenage mom and an actual from-Africa African, who has eaten government cheese and worn out the soles of his shoes campaigning-- it's compelling. No matter how much of an insider he really is, how much a product of his party's machine, at least he's something different. Even if it's an illusion of difference-- how much does that mean??
The very fact that the final rundown for the Democratic nominee was between a woman-- a woman!! and a biracial man-- no matter how much the fact remains that they were both products of the same machine that has fed us the same homogenized pabulum of priveleged elite politicians-- the very illusion of difference has meant so much, to so many people.
It's not smugness, to most of us.
It means that the thing that makes us different, that makes us not white men, that very thing can no longer, by itself, be viewed as a legitimate obstacle. It should no longer mean that we don't try. It will still mean that we're less likely to succeed. But it should no longer be believed, on its own, that this thing, this difference, is in itself an insurmountable obstacle.
(Should I here admit that, as a Roman Catholic, I'm actually a tiny bit excited about Biden, just from a demographic point of view? He's the first and only since JFK, who basically had to forswear his Catholicism in order to be a serious candidate.)
Aside: I don't find Palin particularly empowering. She is the kind of exemplar that makes you embarrassed to be remotely identifiable with her, the worst sort of hypocrite-- so pregnancies are only a private family matter if it's your daughter, and not if it's me?-- but that's a rant for another time. At least the GOP took Hillary seriously enough to offer us a marionette in her place? I guess?
The President him- or herself does not make or break the nation. We survived Buchanan (at the cost of 600,000 American soldiers
) , we'll probably survive Bush. We'll undoubtedly survive whoever we get this next time. So, though I don't agree with all his policies, and can't promise I won't gnash my teeth repeatedly over the next four years (knock on wood; I'd rather gnash my teeth at him than at That Other One) I do find him a much-lesser of two evils. He probably won't make it illegal for me to make decisions about my body. He might make it possible for me to actually get timely healthcare in a reasonably affordable fashion. He probably won't make outright outlaws of my gay friends who want to own property and raise children together. (Maybe. He may not help them either, but at least it's unlikely he'll try to fuck things up worse for them.)
And what's more: he doesn't fill my European friends and relatives with creeping crawling horror and revulsion. I lost friends over Bush, even when I cried that I hadn't voted for him: he just disgusted them so much.
Maybe I can go abroad again without pretending to be Canadian.
I know it's vain. But a world that thinks our President is kind of cool is a lot less likely to launch more terrorist attacks against us than a world that thinks our President is a second-generation imperialist pigdog asshole dictator wannabe.
It would just be nice, for a change, to have someone who didn't routinely feast upon his own feet during public discourse. Is that so wrong?
Hey, my dad was in the Army from 1967 until 2007. (They delayed his mandatory retirement by a year because there was a war on, but they wouldn't send a 61-year-old to Iraq-- much to his disappointment, because my father is a contrary bastard.)
So I know about the politics of the military thing. Those little things can get you and I can't think of an example right now. But I do routinely run outside when I hear a helicopter, and try to identify it, so I can call my dad and tell him. (He doesn't need to look; he knows how they sound, even though his hearing was damaged permanently in Vietnam.)
and I know what you mean about the sounds that make you cry, to your own surprise. I have an uncle who is retired navy.... he was an F-14 fighter pilot, top gun, all that jazz. They live in Virginia Beach, near a big, active, base. And the constant, thundering roar of the jets... that to me was just sort of deafening and annoying- well it makes my cousins cry to hear it, b/c they call it "the sound of freedom". And whether or not you agree with the politics of the military blah blah blah- sometimes those little patriotic things just get you when you least expect it.
nicely put.