I work in a black area of Columbia, SC. The business owner is black, as is most of the staff and nearly all the patients. Today we had two white women (besides myself) working for us. They are on-again, off-again part-timers and I don't know either of them well. But knowing the rest of the staff, I thought it would be nice to bring in a bottle of sparkling grape juice for a toast to Obama's win. Everyone assembled and we were just waiting on the Doctor to join us. I sensed some tension when I overheard the younger temp asking two, then three times, "What are we toasting?" and each time, the older temp answering her, "The new President." It quickly became clear that neither of the women were Obama supporters. The older woman muttered, "He's President and there's nothing we can do about it" as a conciliatory gesture toward the younger woman. But she wouldn't have any of it. She refused to toast with us or even to partake of any of the sparkling juice. I felt the air going out of my hope balloon.
Afterward, one of the other gals and I were talking. She has a four year old son whom she took to the voting booth with her yesterday. He announced repeatedly at the polling place, to anyone who would listen, "My Mommy voted for Barack Obama." My co-worker did not realize that the kid even knew who the opponent was until he said, "We don't want John McCain. He will be bad for everyone's budgets and they won't be able to buy Transformers." She also had to go through one of those "literal" moments when her son asked why the people on TV kept saying Obama was "African-American". She explained this referred to the color of his skin, the fact that Obama is black, like they are. The kid examined his hands and arms and declared, "But I'm not black. I'm brown!" Last night, waiting for the returns to come in, the Mom fell asleep but the 4 year old stayed awake, eyes glued to the television. He apparently didn't understand the meaning of Barack Obama being declared the projected winner when the west coast polls closed. But an hour later, when he saw the acceptance speech start in front of 200,000 cheering supporters, he began shaking his Mom to wake her up. "Mommy, someone won! Someone won!"
Just a simple little story but it came at the right moment for me. I tried to imagine what it would be like for this kid to grow up, seeing Barack Obama on TV regularly and thinking of him as our President. He would think of Obama the way I thought of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter - guys who kept me from watching what I really wanted to see on TV and who talked forever. And who were in charge of the country. Obama would be that guy to this kid and to all the kids growing up right now. Just some President. The President. Our President. How about that?
My hope balloon is still flying.