It had already been a long day for me, and for the country, when
I rode the train downtown to Grant Park on the night of Nov. 4. History was
crowding against my thoughts — my car was full of joyful, youthful,
rock-the-vote noise — as I looked out the window into the Chicago night
and saw a bright orange (papaya-colored, really) quarter moon hovering over the
horizon, beautiful and strange beyond reckoning.
I had never seen anything quite like it and was shaken with a
sense of wonder: Where am I? Am I dreaming?
By a 60-40 margin, San Francisco this past Tuesday adopted the strongest anti-Iraq War position yet taken by the voters of a major American city. In supporting Proposition U, they have declared it city policy that its "elected representatives in the United States Senate and House of Representatives should vote against any further funding for the deployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq, with the exception of funds specifically earmarked to provide for their safe and orderly withdrawal."
It is hard to overstate the landslide victory for women last night.
The election of President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect
Joe Biden spells the end of eight long years of an administration that
used every legislative, judicial, and administrative weapon in its
arsenal to attack women's health and rights. With a Supreme Court
poised on the knife-edge of turning back decades of progress for women,
we will now have leadership who support everything from equal pay to
reproductive rights - providing the opportunity to appoint judges who
share these convictions.
Amid the euphoria around Obama's
tremendous victory, gay men and women across America will find it
difficult to contain their disappointment, anger, and a painful sense
of betrayal. The success of Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that
amends California's state constitution to define marriage as only
between a man and a woman, shows that despite all the gains we still
rank low when it comes to the struggle for equality.
Of all the factors contributing
to Obama's victory – luck, economic crisis, Bush, Palin – a major
factor is now so second-nature to us that we may overlook its transformative
impact since just four years ago: the Internet and the progressive online
boom.
"The
moral arc of universe is long is but it bends towards justice." —
Martin Luther King
It's tempting to be swept up
in the emotion. It was only 50 years ago that black people were being regularly
lynched to the glee of terrorist mobs. Folks like my grandfather — one of
the lucky ones — endured the humiliation of having fellow Navy men look
for his "monkey tail" in the shower.
In what other nation has a member of a
historically-oppressed minority risen to the highest elected office in the
land?
America wakes tomorrow to a landscape created by its people. It is a landscape that has been tended over the days, hours and minutes of the last two years by the door-knockers, phone-callers and canvassers, the cake-bakers, the sandwich makers, the lemonade sellers. It is a landscape awash with the work of women and children and men.
