Prayer Answered

It's been almost two weeks now.
We did it.

It's still overwhelming. What do you write? What is there to write, when more than half a century's effort--or, really, the effort of more than two hundred years--finally pays off? My mother was half my age, still a teenager, when she and a quarter-million other people marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King. She remembers the word going around in the days before the march: Everybody make sure you dress nicely. If there's anybody who doesn't look nice, that's who the reporters will photograph--they're trying to make us look dangerous, dirty, abnormal. My mother marched on Washington in a wool dress and pearls, and nearly fainted in the sweltering August heat.

Twenty-five years later, when I was still too young to vote, I volunteered for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. That was twenty years ago.

I walked into a friend's office on the morning of November 5th so we could rejoice together, since we'd both spent Election Day pollwatching, and she was wiping tears from her cheeks. She's African-American, in her mid-forties, with two kids in grade school. She said, "I finally feel like I am a citizen of this country." And she said, "For the first time, I can look my kids in the face and tell them they can be anything they want." And she said, "We haven't just been watching Obama. Uh-uh. We've been watching how you folks"--i.e., white people--"react to Obama. That's what's been blowing our minds. Do you realize 67% of young voters voted for him? Sixty-seven percent! And that's who's gonna be interviewing my kids when my kids get out of school and need jobs!"

Two days earlier she'd said, "They're gonna steal this election. They're gonna steal it from us." But they didn't.

It's almost two weeks later and I still can't watch that "American Prayer" video without crying. The farthest I've gotten so far is to the part where Martin Luther King says, "I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

We as a people: not just one race, not just one generation or nationality, but one people. That video is my people. We are the people who have been fighting, forever, the fight Tom Robbins once described:

"The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men.

We all have the same enemy.

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized."

- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues