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 We have watched tax policies that grant the super wealthy tax cuts on a theory that was outdated seventy-five years ago.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!