Today is the day and yet it remains surreal: I watch an MSNBC shot of thousands (soon to be millions) streaming onto the National Mall. Damn, it’s 6:00 am. I’m humbled by possibility. We all are. America is.
A relatively young man: a father hailing from a place in the world where humankind is arguably asserted to have been “born.” A mother from the heartland of wheat and corn covered Kansas: one black, the other white. And this, the child, one Barack Hussein Obama, now stands an obvious and improbable incarnation of possibility.
“Only in America!” Yea, “Only in America,” a phrase once reserved for conservative assertions for a trip in the “way back” machine to a time when black folk knew their place, and white privilege proceeded unabated, is now a phrase that resonates with full meaning: only in America can an African American fully embrace the historical assertion of the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal…”
This assertion was once another slice of Swiss cheese, riddled with contradictions: the enslavement of Africans, the emerging and systematic slaughter of Native Americans, the casual and unquestioned disenfranchisement of women, and of course the ongoing obliteration of the least of these—defenseless children held on the periphery of everything from healthcare to education.
But this is the day that Americans can begin a process of healing, a process of taking back a country that has been run quite literally like there was no tomorrow. As the culprits slink back to their opulent dungeons situated at some unmarked circle of hell, may they be assisted in atoning for their assault on humanity.
Storm clouds are lifting. Light envelops darkness, and possibility is not a bad word, not a bad feeling. Possibility is love and pervades this stanza from “Lift Every Voice and Sing:”
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We end where we begin: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let's rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalms 118:24)
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