Change

Have I mentioned how much I adore Obama? I've never voted Republican and I certainly wouldn't have in this election either, but something particularly clicked for me about Obama and it was around the time of the Jeremiah Wright press coverage. Up until then, the Obama campaign appeared to be running a non-racial campaign, really trying not to emphasize it, in order to try to transcend it, and I get that. After experiencing the wreckage that is the Bush administration, as well as witnessing candidate after candidate, vying for the primary, each seeming like business-as-usual - false and difficult to relate to, jaded and fear mongering in my eyes - I felt more or less dispassionate about the political world. But then the focus became on Jeremiah Wright's incendiary church sermons and comments, and Obama decided (and from what I understand it actually was his decision, not that of his advisers') to not simply address race, but to highlight it. He didn't back away or make excuses or pass the buck or lie. He spoke to it. He gave a speech that reached me by e-mail. Turns out he even wrote it. It touched on the history of racial conflict in America, its divisiveness, and the effects of this divisiveness on both blacks and whites. And though I can't recall the exact words, it was the feeling behind them: the intelligence, the authenticity, the thoughtfulness, the trueness, that moved me to tears in a way that I had never in a million years thought could by a politician. I mean, politicians are twisted and corrupt and that's how they get to where they are and that fact that they can tolerate the corruption around them, makes them even more twisted and corrupt, right? But on that day, I listened to his words and his message - about race and struggle, power and pain, common-ground, hope and change. About being human. Which, as difficult as it is for people to realize the importance and miracle of that commonality, is the whole point. And, for some reason, I think Barak Obama gets that. So I listened, I cried and I felt grateful that in my lifetime I was witness to a great thinker and speaker. And I passed it on. It just felt that important. And now that man who moved me to tears will be my president. And that moves me to tears too.