Loud Hallelujahs Let Us Sing

Never has history been so alive for me as at this very moment. Thomas Jefferson’s campaign song has been ringing in my ears for over a year now. I have been waiting to sing it. Now I can: “The gloomy night before us flies, the reign of darkness now is over…”

We have been in darkness these past eight years. It has been a darkness of fear and suspicion. Fear of terror. Terror of fear. Fear of Muslims or those who look slightly different. Fear of those who are not “real Americans” as the losing Vice Presidential candidate put it. Fear of foreigners as if we were not all born of foreigners. It has been a darkness of division and exclusion. It has been a darkness where politicians have manipulated our lowest animal instincts—our lizard brains. Our fears.

We have been in darkness. Our congressional representatives in both parties have collaborated in the invasion of a country that posed no threat to us. We have watched as sons and daughters, father and mothers, sisters and brothers both American and Iraqi have been maimed and killed—for no good reason. We have watched super rich corporations get richer and richer in a war that has drained us dry. We have watched tax policies that grant the super wealthy tax cuts on a theory that was outdated seventy-five years ago. “Trickle down”??!! That went out with Herbert Hoover only to be resurrected by this moribund outgoing administration.

We have been in darkness. Not even during the notoriously corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding have the corporate partners of the ruling party so blatantly robbed the public coffers as they have these past eight years.

We have been in darkness where words have lost their meaning. “Freedom” has come to mean invasion and war. “Liberty” has come to mean government sanctioned torture and spying upon citizens without cause or legal permission. And “Prosperity” has come to mean growing indebtedness, crumbling roads and schools, unemployment, and economic collapse. Even George Orwell could not parody these past eight years.

We have been in darkness. And yet with darkness there is light. Always there is light, burning even brighter for the darkness itself.

We Americans have a history of independence. As a country we were born in a revolution for independence. We have a history of resisting attempts to tell us what to do or who to be. We are a nation of uprooted people. We are a nation of strangers in a strange land. Most of us are descended from folks who pulled up stakes in their homeland to seek a new life in a new world. Or we were ripped from our homelands to servitude across the vast oceans that divide North America from Africa.

Yet, for ninety years after the first guns of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington, the curse of slavery lay across us like a shadow. Our liberty could not be liberty while millions were enslaved.

There is no greater division in a country than civil war. The War came and slavery was abolished. It was a long and bloody war of brother against brother. And, at the helm of the Union government was Abraham Lincoln, a self educated lawyer from Illinois. It was Lincoln at his second inaugural address at the end of the War that called for “malice to none and charity to all.” It was Lincoln that called for healing after so many anguished years of death and division.

Today we stand divided. No civil war has torn us apart, but divided we are. This last campaign showed that. On one side there was an appeal to the “real” Americans. On one side there were as an article in Harper’s Magazine pointed out, more slime and lies than in any other campaign. On one side there was fear. There was hatred and there was anger. When the Republican candidate gave his concession speech, the crowd booed more than once at the mention of Obama. There was hatred. There was anger.

On the other side, Barak Obama, a Black man, called for unity. He has called for a gathering of our people to solve the issues that need to be solved. He called upon our country as a whole to realize its potential—to recognize its unique history and move into the unknown. For moving into the unknown is part of our history from the gates of Ellis Island to the shores of Plymouth, from the slave ships at Charleston harbor to the “prairie schooners” of Nebraska.

Barak Obama has consented to represent the best in us. And we have responded in kind. There is no arrogance here but the greatest humility which is probably why he is the most unique political leader we have had since Lincoln. President-Elect Obama has recognized his rendezvous with history profoundly. He nurtures the empowerment of an entire people. “Yes we can.” This is not just a slogan of a political campaign. It is something much larger even than the man himself. And he seems to clearly know that as well.

Never have I felt greater hope and excitement about our country than I do at this moment. Franklin D. Roosevelt took office at a time of crisis. “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear, itself.”

We are now in a moment of crisis. Yet there is a wave of hope throughout this land.

Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the constrictor. Fear is the opposite of love. President-elect Barak Obama is leading us out of fear by recognizing that we can change our lives---and ourselves. And the only way that healing and unity can occur is if people begin talking and listening and reaching out to each other. That can happen only on the basis of expansion and love. What a wondrous time this is!

Of course there are still private interests. Fact is, however, that ninety-nine per cent of the American people are potential friends. Fact is that improved quality of life is something that benefits us all.

This is not just about a man. It is about what that man has taken upon himself to represent. And that defines the greatness of the man.

Our history has been linked to song. At the Lincoln Monument in 1963 Martin Luther King rang out the words “free at last! Free at last! Praise God almighty, we’re free at last.”

When the powerful British army confronted the rag tag armies of the American colonists, another song rang out. William Billings of Boston was a classical American misfit. He had one eye, was lame in one leg, had a deformed arm and wrote the battle song of the American Revolution, “Chester.” He wrote of how British

“vet'rans flee before our youth,

And gen'rals yield to beardless boys.

Today is a victory for the young in heart as well as young in age.

The song concluded. It rings down to all of us.

What grateful off'ring shall we bring,

What shall we render to the Lord?

Loud hallelujahs let us sing

From the mountains of Vermont to the harbor of San Diego, from churches, synagogues and mosques, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Finger Lakes of New York--Loud hallelujahs let us sing. Amen!

We Have Reasons to Be Proud

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an excellent chance that a majority of the people in the United States of America will have elected a Black man President of the United States.

By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an amazingly good chance that the people of the United States will have elected someone whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian.

By the morning of November 5, 2008, there is a wildly wonderful possibility that the people of the United States will elect someone who grew up in a non traditional family. He was raised by his single mother and his grandmother.

How far we have come in such a short period of time.

I remember my first visit to my relatives in New Orleans. It was in 1953 and I was fourteen. It was the first time I had ever seen the segregated south. There were water fountains for “Colored” and water fountains for “White”. There were adjustable seats in the trolleys where the rear section was “Colored” and the forward section was “White”. It seemed pretty stupid to me at the time and I liked to hear the story about how my grandma and her younger sister would come down South to visit and that the two old ladies would always march down to the “Colored” section and sit down. Nobody tried to tell my Grandma what to do.

It would be two years after my visit that Emmett Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago was beaten, shot and killed in Money, Mississippi. His crime was to have whistled at a white woman. He was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable. It was a a ring that he wore that provided clear identification.

It was only a few years earlier that the president of the United States abolished segregation in the military. Black soldiers did not mix with white before then. The catalyst for this change happened during the Korean War. A platoon of Black soldiers took a hill. Their white soldiers thought they were North Korean and shot them down.

A year after my visit to New Orleans the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the schools and Jim Crow began to die. It was hastened on its way by a whole generation of young folks, black and white, marching, sitting, , waiting for service in restaurants, getting people to vote. But uniquely, the leadership of this movement was mainly young black men.

The late Chou En Lai, Premier of the Peoples Republic of China was a most sophisticated and well educated man. He had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. He knew a great deal about world history. A few years ago, some interviewer asked Chou whether the French Revolution had any effect on China and the world. He thought for a moment and answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” The French Revolution had been around for almost two hundred years. The Chinese have a different historical perspective.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a Negro had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. That was the law of the land.

This same Supreme Court decision held that all people of African descent that were brought as slaves could never be citizens of the United States. It held that the United States Congress could not prohibit slavery in the federal territories that would become states. That was the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court. That was the law of the land one hundred and fifty years ago. Some perspective: when I was born there were people alive who were alive when the Dred Scott decision was made. Not so long ago.

Less than a decade after this decision, slavery was over. Less than a decade later, Congress and the country amended the Constitution extended the right to vote regardless of “previous condition of servitude.”

How fast things change. How fast people drop old beliefs.

And then there’s the family. In that dulled period of the 1950’s the happy family was all over the place, on t.v., the movies. Divorces were much rarer then.

I went to a wonderfully nurturing very small camp called Journey’s End Farm. There were rarely more than twenty-four of us but there were a significant number of kids from “broken homes”. (My home was broken when I was nine and my dad died).

Single mothers were off my radar when I was a kid. With the exception of my own, of course. There just weren’t too many of them around.

When I was a kid the one thing that was quite a bit weirder than “broken homes” was “mixed marriages”. My step father had a very close friend, Ray Stowe. He was a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His wife, Bea, was Black. I think that they did not have kids because of just how complicated that could be. Even my open minded mother would lower her voice when talking about “mixed marriages” like it was a problem to be endured by those engaging in it.

We, the people of the United States by the morning of November 5, 2008 very likely will have elected a man born of a marriage between a Black man and a white woman. We will have elected a man brought up by a single mother and a grandmother.

More than this, we will have elected a man who rose like an American myth through his hard work and persevering to transcend and to help us transcend our false divisions. This truly is an independently tough human being. (The other presidential candidate has rarely done anything new. I mean, after all, he went into the family business of war. No originality there. McCain and Grandsons—Killers of Men. Some Maverick. Raise the Flag. My Country Right or Wrong. All That Jazz.)

It is, perhaps, the unique greatness of the man that allows us to drop our old biases. It is the individuality and honesty of the man that touches us before we even notice the color of his skin. His intelligence and sincerity are intelligent and sincere.

Point is that millions upon millions of voices will be raised to elect a man president who would not have been able to sit in a Woolworth lunch counter if he had been born forty years earlier.

We have got to this point, so many tens of millions of us. No matter what the results of November 4, we have got to this point. And for that we can be proud of ourselves as Americans.