CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Thoughts the Day Before Obama's Inauguration Day

Monday, January 19, 2009

this entry brought to you by nine inch nails, "the collector"


My wife and I were talking about how it's a funny coincidence that Barack Obama will be inaugurated the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. After a little thought we realized, well, any President is going to be inaugurated the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so no matter when we got around to electing a black President, he would be inaugurated the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The only real coincidence is that Dr. King happened to have had a birthday near enough to the third Monday for that to be the nationally recognized holiday, and that just happens to be the day before inauguration day-- after all, if his birthday was in August and we celebrated it in the third Monday of that month, there wouldn't be much of a coincidence at all when we got around to electing a black President.

Michelle and I started discussing the fact that we now have a black President, and how certain people, generally of an older generation, thought we'd never have one. I always knew we'd have a black President one day, and that I'd be around to see it. I just had no idea that I wouldn't even be thirty years old before it happened. I think I always assumed I'd be middle aged.

Then the subject of Celest, our six year old, came up. She's at a funny age. She's very aware of the world around her. She's been taught at school that we've elected Barack Obama, and he's going to be the first black President. In fact, she's only in first grade, and this past election they had a mock election at her school. This surprised me because there was a national election when I was in first grade, but my school didn't participate in our mock election until I was in the fifth grade. Celest's school voted for John McCain, which didn't surprise me, as this is Arizona, and Senator McCain is from here; in fact, McCain readily took this state, as expected. Celest voted for Obama, unsurprisingly, since we are Obama supporters in this house. My point in mentioning all this is to say that she is definitely going to remember all the events surrounding this election, just as I remember when the Challenger exploded when I myself was in the first grade. I can remember that day pretty well.

But she's going to actually grow up and become a person in a post-Obama world, so while she'll be taught about Obama in school, she'll learn all about him, she'll probably even learn that he came after a hideously unpopular President, she won't know this moment like we adults know this moment right now. She'll be here for it and remember it, but she won't know it like we do. To her it's just cool. Awesome, Barack Obama is cool, and it's great he got elected, she thinks. And she's going to grow up in a post Obama world, where Obama is going to be a historical figure. When they put Obama on a dollar bill (don't bet they won't) she'll be able to tell her Grandchildren all about it-- but having grown up in a post-Obama world, to her it's just going to be cool, like any other historical fact.

I think of it like Martin Luther King Jr. I of course know a lot about Dr. King, and I know of his significance, and I've seen his "I have a dream" speech all the way through several times, as well as abbreviated versions of it countless times, and I get choked up every single time. But just imagining what it would've been like to have actually have been alive at the time and seeing this happening, actually seeing change occurring right in front of you must have been magnificent, and it's something you can't pass along to young people. For us with our new President, it's something that's happening right now, and while everyone after us will be able to benefit from it, to learn from it, this feeling of hope and pride a special sensation that actually will die with us because it's not something tangible you can actually teach your children in a way they can grasp, even as adults.

It's something you hope won't get lost in the shuffle of history somehow, but you know it won't. What really matters is that someday, somehow, your children will get an event so remarkable and so history changing that they'll be able to tell their grandchildren about it, about what it was like-- you just hope the whole world doesn't have to get as fucked up as it was just yesterday in order for that event to mean something.
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with love from CRS @ 7:46 AM 

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