It's hard for anyone who wasn't there to understand what 1968 was like. Even harder, perhaps, to understand what it was like to come of age in the late 60's. It was a time of enormous hope, unbelievable possibility, and crushing loss. I was seventeen the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I can still remember the pain of hearing that news. (And I was a white kid in the north, so my pain was as nothing compared to that of the folk who were really invested in him.) I remember where I was the morning I heard that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I remember the insanity of the 1968 democratic convention when Eugene McCarthy, the first politician to whom I gave my heart, was shoved aside so the machine could continue with Hubert Humphrey, a once great man who had been compromised by his loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, a once great man made insane by the trap of the Vietnam War.
I remember the hope, and I remember the loss. I remember the way dreams died at Kent State.
And my heart has been broken for forty years, mourning for the country that I love, and the dreams that I grew up with.
Let me make it clear. I'm a left wing radical who is wildly patriotic, in love with this country because of what I learned in church, the boy scouts, and my public school civics classes. (I know how to fold and care for a flag, which is more than I can say for the right wing assholes who claim to honor the flag but leave it hanging outside, faded and tattered, in all sorts of weather.) All I have ever wanted is for us to be be what I was taught we are: the home of hope and freedom.
Hell, it was believing what I was taught that made me a radical to begin with. I just wanted us to mean what we said.
As a result, I've spent forty years with a broken heart. And now - like the guy who has been dumped a dozen times, but is ready to give love one last chance - I'm filled with hope again. And it scares me. Because I don't know if I can take having my heart broken one more time.
But this time it feels different. It really does.
This time it starts to feel like, after forty years (forty-five, if you mark the start of our long national nightmare with the assassination of John Kennedy) that we may be ready to come home to our own best selves.
I have wept buckets of tears over this campaign, but they are the best tears, the tears of joy, the tears of hope, the tears of "Yes we can."
In Barack Obama,in the gathering that he has inspired of young and old; the gathering of black, white, Latino, Asian, and every other ethnic group imaginable; the gathering of straight and gay; the gathering of old line democrats and republicans ready for something new, I feel a kind of hope that was crushed forty years ago in the streets of Chicago, in the election of Richard Nixon, in the continuation of a crazed, immoral, and illegal war.
I fucking love this country, and I have been waiting forty years for it to come to its senses.
I'm willing to fall in love one more time.
It's the scariest thing I've done in several decades.
UPDATE
Holy Moses. I've been overwhelmed by the response you guys have given this. You've moved me to more tears, several times over. Thanks for all the music, the videos, and most of all the personal stories.
When I started working on this I was just making some notes for something I thought I might try to write in a day or so. But suddenly it came pouring out in a big burst. I think it must have been building up inside for some time. It's deeply heartening to find that so many of you have been feeling the same way.
I keep hoping, hoping, hoping that in this year that is almost like a time warp we're finally going to correct what happened four decades ago, and return our country to what it could and should have been. Part of me is terrified that history will repeat itself, and the darkness will return. But the better part of me is longing to believe that this is indeed a new beginning.
I feel as if we are all literally aching with the sense of possibility right now.
Like Barack himself, you guys give me hope.
Thanks.