Move On Over, Or We’re Going To Move Over You

(Happy Birthday Jay! – promoted by NLinStPaul)

I turned thirty-two years old today.  And one week from today, I will do something I have never done before: cast my vote for the winning candidate for President of the United States, Senator Barack Obama.  It will be an interesting change to have a President who has my actual endorsement.

It has been an interesting political season, as well.  The prospective election of a multi-racial man to the Presidency has brought out much of the worst of Americans.  All of us are familiar with the reprehensible public statements, the shouted epithets at crowds and rallies, the slanderous emails which many of us have received.  A loud, angry minority perceives that they have lost their grip on the country, and fear what it means for the “Real America”, which they define as excluding me, you and pretty much everyone we know.

All of this has offended many of you; it has offended me as well.  It offends me to hear believers in other political principles than I describe where my friend Summer and her husband and daughter as not being the “real Virginia”, although I imagine that Summer herself was fairly enthusiastic to hear it.  It offends me to hear that my friends and I in New York City are not among the “best of America” because we don’t live in small towns in Republican states.  I may have spent the bulk of my life on the East Coast of the US, but that has not diminished my appreciation for Texas, where my aunt lives, or Louisiana, where my father is from.  Indeed, my political representatives have shared that view as well.  There was no diminished distress when Louisiana, among the “reddest” of states, was drowning from government apathy while the President took time out to celebrate John McCain’s birthday.

Many notable voices have deplored these offensive and divisive remarks.  But I am glad for them, both because sunlight truly is the best disinfectant and because that these voices are so willing to speak openly is proof that they know they are losing, and are desperate because of it.

And in this moment, I want to take a minute to thank all of you.

In 1968, shortly before the Democratic Convention in Chicago and shortly after the riots that had ensued after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., reporters were granted access to the special training sessions Mayor Daley had ordered for the police.  One of the officers stated to a reporter: “If the fight starts, don’t expect it to last long.  We’ll win in the first round and there won’t be a rematch.”  My father was one of the thousands arrested in Chicago during the convention, a graduate student just trying to get home.  When, on the convention floor, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff deplored the situation, saying that “with George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” Mayor Daley responded by shouting “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”  That was our country, eight years before I was born.

That was our country.  A place where J. Edgar Hoover in his official capacity called Dr. King a communist agent, a Democratic party which elected George Wallace governor three times, where President Nixon could order staffers to make lists of Jews in government employ and staffers would do it.

But you, all of you, changed that.  The fight has lasted a long time, and is by no means over, but none of you let the results of the first rounds dictate the bout.  You made choices to ensure that you lived and raised your children in communities which were integrated with people of many races and cultures, and taught us all, friends, students and family alike, that we would be better off if we understood and believed that people are always people like us, regardless of race, religion, gender or orientation.  You taught me to believe that we can and do make the world a better place most through the small action of being better people.

So, thank you.  Thank you for helping build the world we live in today, and allowing me the opportunity to take part in an important moment in both my personal and our nation’s history.  I am grateful and proud.  Forty years ago, Stokely Carmichael warned the forces of racism and segregation to “Move on over, or we’re going to move over you.”  Together, we will fulfill that promise.

17 comments

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  1. …have a wonderful evening, and last week before the election.

    • RiaD on October 29, 2008 at 01:03

    i didn’t know your favorite, so…..

    Photobucket

  2. Thank you.

  3. What a wonderful tribute to the progress that has been made on this journey.

    You might be interested in what Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican had to say along the same lines.

    How do we leave behind this type of view? How do we cut it loose? It has been a part of the USA from the start. Do we advance past it, heal past it just by living and talking about these things? Time passing? Natural change?

    We are doing it now, aren’t we? Step by step.

    Fear, yes. Loathing, yes. Revulsion, yes and sadness, too. But I am also very excited because I feel we actually move closer to purging-no…simply engaging, or recognizing-some of the ghosts here in even these instances as of late, these spiritually sulphurous expulsions of violent energy and racism. At least on a large, collective level. Part of that shift in dialogue and awareness is vastly facilitated by the Internet, of course. And we move closer not by electing a black man per se, but rather by meeting these conflicts together and suddenly being forced to discuss them (which of course only rise because of Obama’s candidacy).

    • Diane G on October 29, 2008 at 02:06

    and I hope Obama brings you (us) everything we could hope for!

  4. Great essay, and I thank you for your writing that never allows me to blindly except and always moves me to learn more then my entrenched view ppoint. My rigid ideology has bended from this journey and I have learned a lot. I am also casting my first vote for a candidate that’s a winner and I actually want to win.  

    I read a book that made me think of you last week. It’s called Dreaming Up America by Russell Banks. He’s one of my favorite novelists and it was interesting to hear his views of our history, economics and culture. Both the good and the ugly, the varying elements that have brought us all here. This has been a long 8 years, but if nothing else it made me find the real America through my communities both electronic and in the flesh. Strange bedfellows aren’t always so strange once you know they are of good will.      

  5. I wasn’t in Chicago during the Dem Convention in ’68, I was in Madison, Alabama where I was a community organizer.  Long story short: the Daley-Ribicoff exchange didn’t surprise me in the slightest when I saw it from my living room on TV.  It was, I thought, emblematic of the post-Vietnam, post-Voting Rights shambles that was the Democratic Party.

    The people demonstrating in Chicago didn’t consider themselves Democratic Party members.  They, like me, believed the party was incapable of opposing oppression, if not completely evil.  Or as somebody else (was it Eldridge Cleaver?) said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

    We’ve come a long way indeed.  

    • Edger on October 29, 2008 at 14:43

    Here’s hoping it was good day and that you’re not starting 33 with (too much of) a hangover? 🙂

  6. Mine’s around the corner too-same age. Scorpios rule.

    The last time my birthday was on Election day, it was 2004. That wasn’t fun.

  7. Photobucket

    (oh and great essay, btw!)

    • Atticus on October 30, 2008 at 19:02

    Very well said.  I only hope that we can bring Obama all that he is hoping for – a committed, educated and involved American citizenry.

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