LittleWyvern.com

Si Se Puede

Today was obviously a very big day in the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, whether they are American citizens or not. The feverish swarm of blog posts no doubt already outnumbers the votes about which they are being written, but while this entry is going to be an anonymous +1 among the masses (fittingly, just like my own vote) I feel some sense of obligation to offer my immediate reactions. It is not an obligation to you, and certainly not one to the faceless online universe. Instead I feel that I owe it to myself, both now and in the future, to reflect upon the significance of a day, year, and campaign that carries with it such a profoundly abstract significance. Over the course of the next days and decades countless experts and well-meaning amateurs will attempt to dissect recent events and quantify both how they came to happen and what they will come to mean. If I might be so humble, tonight I will attempt neither.

I do not dare to presume what the impact of this election will be, not for myself nor anyone else. The TV is currently overrun with various pundits hailing Barack’s success as a stunning victory against racism. Sure, I would like to believe that were true, but coming from me such claims would be empty. As a young boy just entering elementary school, one of my best neighborhood friends was black. Throughout middle school, high school, and beyond my best friends have mostly been Asian and Indian. I did not campaign for Senator Obama because he was black, nor did I do it because I was white.

For me racism is not a problem so serious that it requires stunning victories.

Still, I am not blind to the oft-veiled intolerance that this campaign managed to bring into the light. In truth I felt genuine confusion every time a stranger would say to me, “You know he’s a Muslim, right?” It took a very long time before I managed to alter my instinctive response from “So what?” to “No, he isn’t.”

The difference in the responses is profound; but while the second response became necessary, just giving it was to admit another kind of defeat. You see, by responding “So What?” the issue up for debate is racism itself. “Why should it matter that he is Muslim… or not?”

By responding, “No, he isn’t.” the issue up for debate is one of simple truth. “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?” I understand the political wisdom of reframing a question into those terms, but it always did bother me… and probably always will… that by phrasing the question as a yes/no we are implicitly agreeing that being a Muslim is bad. The biggest race issue of the campaign silently transformed from “Should we vote for a black man?” to “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”

Barack Obama is black; sadly that was not something that his campaign staff could change. At some point during the campaign, however, whether intentionally or by accident, someone somewhere realized that being black in America isn’t the Worst Case Scenario.

No, sir.

In the America of 2008 it is far, far better to be black than to be Muslim.

Again, whether or not someone actually thought this out ahead of time is irrelevant because somewhere along the way the issue of racism was silently reframed. It became so obvious that we should never vote for a Muslim that the question of him being black became almost entirely irrelevant. The Obama Truth Squads apparently did a good job of convincing the public that he wasn’t Muslim (because he isn’t), and therefore he was safe.

Politically Brilliant? Yes.
A Logical Fallacy? For sure.
A Victory over Racism? Eh… not really.

This election is a tremendous milestone for Black America I have no doubt. But while African-American children go to sleep tonight newly believing that they can be anything they want in this country… consider what Arab-American children must now be left to think.

But I digress…

All of this was my strange and conspiracy-toned way of saying that what appears to be such a clear rejection of hate may not be quite so powerful as it seems. The world remains forever full of the ignorant and intolerant, always in the minority but never quiet. That so many of the remaining majority bothered to show up at the various polls and caucuses along the way is a testament to the candidate, not a referendum on human tolerance. If you happen to disagree with me here please allow me to now sadistically shatter your utopian dream balloon as I refer you to the results of the evening’s various state ballot initiatives.

At the same time our nation was standing up for equality and tolerance we were apparently also casting our ballots against the civil rights of millions of Americans. Various political analysts reported tonight that John McCain’s age was more important to voters than Barack Obama’s race. Perhaps the McCain campaign would have been well served to take a page from the Obama strategy and rephrase the question from being not, “Is John McCain too old?” but rather, “Is John McCain gay?”

Sorry, again I have digressed…

Despite what I believe to be a gross exaggeration of the idealism behind President-Elect Obama’s ultimate victory, I remain tremendously optimistic about the future that it might bring. More than that, though, I am utterly staggered to think about the absurd unlikelihood of this moment.

In 2004 I voted for Barack to fill our state’s (Illinois) empty Senate seat. I didn’t really know much of anything about him, but I knew that his opponent was a total fucking nut-bag. Lukas and I were talking tonight and I told him that Obama should have taken a moment in his victory speech to thank Alan Keyes for running for the Senate in Illinois four years ago. I then took that a step further and said Barack should also thank Jack Ryan for being such a massive perv that he would be forced to resign from that campaign in shame. Barack Obama would very likely not be a US Senator today… let alone the President-Elect… if it were not for the sexual fetishes and creationist socialism of those two men.

And yet… with such bizarre luck on his side Barack was still a distant long shot to even win the presidential nomination. When I started volunteering for the Obama campaign 15 months ago most people in this state had never even heard of him. I made countless campaign phone calls trying to talk about Barack only to be told, “Who?!… Bar-what?” Hillary had all the party machinery, all the party money, and all the public recognition. For several months the best we hoped for was a good showing in the caucuses… but somehow, somewhere along the way that all changed.

Long before he became the nominee, before the Iowa caucuses even, I actually got to meet the senator: shake his hand and say hello in a small room inside of a local high school. He came to Las Vegas to speak to a group of a few hundred of us and answer our questions, ask for our support and our votes. It is almost impossible for me now to reconcile the friendly man that I met one year ago among a group of six hundred dubious strangers with the man I watched on television tonight, speaking at Grant Park in front of 150,000 ardent followers. I know in my head that he is the same charismatic man who signed my book and apologetically tried to explain to our audience why our local schools have such little funding. But in my heart, as I watched the night unfold, it became clear that somewhere along the course of this impossible road he transformed into something more. I remember feeling unbelievably privileged to share a small cafeteria with the man last winter; tonight I felt even more so just to watch him on TV.

And to me that will probably be the true significance of this election. There is indeed a feeling of doing the impossible, reaching for the unattainable; but it is not because he’s black and it is not because I am a Democrat. The election tonight gives me, as I must believe it does for so many others, a renewed belief in the goodness and justice of our world. Barack Obama was never the man who was supposed to win, but he was always the man who you hoped could win, the man you thought should win. Tonight I go to sleep in a world where victories can be had without compromise, where the winner is no longer simply the lesser of two evils, where a worthy long shot is a bet worth making.

Barack’s journey speaks to each of our own. Our roads will be difficult and our destinations often clouded, but with hard work, intelligence, and a healthy dose of good luck we can indeed do anything; we can indeed be anything.

And isn’t that the American Dream?