Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
I woke up this morning and just lay there.
There is still so much going on inside me that I hesitate to put pen to paper.
The whole thing still feels like a dream, like something barely believable, and yet, too real to just disappear.
In my blockmates’ room... we flipped back to NBC just as the channel started working again. After days, weeks of knocking on wood, after just having told Ben and Jose to stop celebrating Ohio because we weren’t done yet, there was a strange empty moment when I could not take in the graphic flashing fireworks across the screen; another when I simply did not believe it.
Barack Obama. 44th President of the United States of America.
We screamed and carried on, of course, and started dialing our friends and family. (I actually had to remind my friend Michael to get off the phone with me and call his parents, after nearly a full minute of our confused screaming.) But as we spoke to person after person, as we watched the electoral tally climb from 280-something to 290-something to over 330, the news began to sink in, really sink in.
To tell the truth, I’m not even sure its hit me now, over 12 hours later.
Strangely enough, while I celebrated to hear civil rights leaders rejoice, while I danced along in our room to the strains of “My president is black…”, the idea of a black man as president was not the concept I had trouble wrapping my head. Perhaps because I am young and black, because I never watched Jesse Jackson’s attempt at the White House, because I know so many black men and women whom I would trust to lead this country, the words “President Barack Obama” felt natural on my tongue.
No – the part I am having trouble wrapping my head around is this.
For over two years, I put my soul into this campaign, this movement. Three months of data entry, phone-banking, and knocking on doors in Manchester, New Hampshire. Nearly a year of arguing his viability to friends and family, slowly converting skeptics a generation or two ahead of me (or cynics my age, young in years if not at heart). Two long years of working, agonizing, hoping, and believing; voting in each primary election; and begging, cajoling, demanding that each of my friends register and do the same. Two years that came down to a single night, proof of something I had long ago given up on.
What I do makes a difference.
What I do can change the world.
I sit here this morning, wrestling not with disbelief over the fact of a black president, but with the realization that I am living today in a world that I envisioned and worked towards.
A world that, though I saw it in my mind’s eye, I never believed I would actually see.
