Thursday, November 6, 2008

Yes we can!


If there is one thing I regret, it is not walking across that Nashua meeting room and shaking Barack Obama by the hand.
So near and yet so far.
I have my photos and my memory. There we were in that small room with Nashua's elderly. Barack was eight feet from us at most. It was very intimate and laid-back.




Barack Obama will never again be seen up close and personal like that - not now he is President-elect of the USA. He will evermore be flanked by Secret Service. He will evermore be mobbed.

I shook hands with candidates at almost every campaign event I attended. But, on this occasion we were in an awkward building, there was a throng around Barack and, frankly, I had been underwhelmed by his speech. Bruce had to get back to work. I simply gave it a miss.


I did not seek to hear him at other events. I threw myself in Hillary's direction where, I later found to my disdain, naive and zealous young campign workers considered it almost traitorous of me to have gone to an Obama event, let alone subscribed to the Obama email feeds or, as I did, buy his campaign buttons.

Barack Obama grew on that long campaign trail. His strategists and campaign staff were clearly powerful and wise - and he was receptive and progressive. That unstructured, casual speech I heard back in early 2007 was a far cry from the stump speeches he was delivering a year later. He had revved up the young from the outset - but there was some profound change in him which emerged through those last months, a star quality, an extraordinary calm within the storm. We all started to fall in love.

And now history has been made.

I shed a tear, there in the office which came to a standstill as Obama gave that splendid speech. I shed a tear for all the hopes now unleashed. I dared to hope that black Americans would start to feel good. That black rappers would call positive messages. That black kids would see a merit in education and ambition.
Other underclasses, too. Obama is the most powerful symbol of equality and hope ever. I mean ever.
"Yes we can," he says.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The breathless wait


The day is here.
I've had my breath held for weeks, amassing lists of all the things that can and will go wrong in the voting processes. There are happening out there, all over the USA - but they are not enough, it seems, to impede this great current.
Obama was not my first choice - but, along with Hillary, I have swung around to support him and to watch him growing in statesmanlike proportions.
He is an elegant and erudite man and my hopes for him are high.

How wonderous it is that he should surmount the frightening power of the great Republican lower class fundamentalist hate machine.
As noted by US analysts, the "Walmart" vote is now Republican since it no longer relates to wealth or class but to the adherence to conservatism and religion-based home education which ensures that dangerous, enlightened ideas never cross the minds of the little home-grown right wingers.
The educated classes are the Democrats these days. And the coffee drinkers. Starbucks came out for Obama and give free coffess to voters and volunteers. How 'bout dat! Only in America.

For the African Americans, an Obama win could lay the foundations for a mass attitudinal change, to give a sense of positivity and hope to that huge American underclass. What a powerful and beautiful country the US could be if its black population took to the books and reached for the stars.