For the last eight years, our country has been bleak and desolate, run by men who have never once in their lives seen me. They’ve only seen their constituency, which are rich, white, conservative, religious, straight businessmen, only some of those category do I fit. The rest of us were merely obstacles to achieving their greatest goal: elevation of power and privilege for the few at the expense of the living and liberty of the many.
I was one of the crowd; one of the Invisibles, that no matter how many letters that I wrote, or how much money I gave to opposing causes, or even if I dared stand in front of them, none of it would make any impact. I was not seen, I was not heard.
But now, the darkened, coarsened halls of our American democracy have suddenly, and brilliantly, become light once again. The lantern? Held by one man, daring to challenge us and all of us to come back into the fold, back into system that discounted me. The light he carries is powered by hope.
Hope has come home.
The light he shared began one rainy evening in Wyoming, after a long day of driving across desolate desert regions and surviving a horrific storm, of which I’d never seen before in my life. A man, speaking at the Democratic convention, spoke of life, of liberty, of all things American. For the first time in four years, I felt seen. I felt like someone was so eloquently speaking the things in my heart, and expressing the hope of the future that I could only dare to dream.
That light, that hope, must have caught on, through the years, spreading like a slow, flickering light of liberty, of promise. As he spoke, he began to reach people, many of whom, like me, had been lost and forgotten by the few.
For our Latino workers in the fields in California, who’s labor is necessary to feed America and who are working long hours with little pay, hope has come home.
For our preschool teachers in Atlanta, who spend all day with our most treasured resource, and earn little pay, hope has come home.
For our manufacturing workers in Michigan, laid off by companies vying to send their businesses oversees for cheap labor, hope has come home.
For our neighbors in St. Louis, who lost their homes due to predatory loan companies and are now living in dire circumstances, hope has come home.
For our grandparents in Florida who are making decisions between paying for groceries or paying for their medication, hope has come home.
For our Wal-mart employees in Nashville, who barely scrape by with minimum wage and are intimidated from forming unions, hope has come home.
For our Alaskan wildlife, whose ecosystem has been damaged nearly beyond repair by human –made global warming, hope has come home.
For our retirees in Maine, who watched their retirement funds spin down the drain in the recent stock market plunge, hope has come home.
For our schoolteachers in Nebraska, who constantly strive for excellence for their students, yet are frustrated that the only measure of that excellence is a single, high-stakes test, hope has come home.
For our brave soldiers in the military who are willing to sacrifice their lives for their interminable and undeniable belief in our country, hope will bring them home.
For our woman, who still suffer pay discrimination forty years after legislation passed to end this heinous practice, hope has come home.
For our disenfranchised peoples across the country, who have suffered under systemic bigotry, intolerance, and overt racism, hope has come home.
For our brave founders, who came together one muggy summer in Philadelphia, and crafted a government and country from the power of the people, conceived with the promise of equality for all, and who, despite the failure of lesser men, survived the battering of authoritarian beliefs, hope has come home.
It’s truly a hopeful day in America.