Blessed and Proud

(Written during the Democratic National Convention in August, 2008)

I woke up feeling blessed this morning.
To be honest, I wake up feeling blessed most every day, because that’s what my father taught me. I cannot remember a night growing up when I didn’t hear him whispering his prayers of thanks in the next room before he drifted off to sleep, or a morning when he wasn’t thankful as soon as he wakened. Perhaps that’s why he lived 95 healthy, happy years on this earth.
The reason I feel especially blessed today is because I got to witness a historic and emotionally fulfilling moment in American history last night. At the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado, I watched with tears in my eyes as a woman who almost got the nomination for presidential candidate urged delegates to give their unanimous support to the first black candidate of a major political party. In the words of Tom Brokaw, it seemed surreal.
I grew up in the sixties, when America was rocked by change. Even as a child, I was painfully aware of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I watched footage of the Viet Nam war each evening on television and feared the day when my school mates would be old enough to fight and die. I remember the riots and police action at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago; only months after Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy had died. I remember seeing the ERA rejected year after year because religious zealots and misogynists convinced voters it would ruin our family values and go against our Christian heritage.
My heartfelt hope of equality and change was a spark that remained as I grew up and married, raised a child and took my place in the American work force. It remained, albeit with a more subdued light, as I watched the new millennium brought in with George W. Bush “elected” without a majority vote. It remained through the last eight years of blunders and strong arm government. It remained as I watched American freedom and liberty stolen from its citizens by the Patriot Act and as America became despised and rejected by other free nations of the world.
It has been hard holding on to hope. It has been hard to keep the individual human spirit elevated through years which saw the greatest division of the American people in history. It has been hard to hope for my daughter’s future when the middle class has dropped further and further into recession and unemployment as the small percentage of the “very rich” got richer and richer.
As expressed in Bill Clinton’s speech last night, the fact remains that American worker productivity has increased every year for the last ten years, even as wages and benefits were reduced and jobs were eliminated. The reward of the American people for all that extra productivity has been a push back down the ladder of progress. It’s time to at least try to even the playing field, so that the “American dream” is available to all Americans, and we avoid becoming a nation of “lords and serfs”.
Yes, it’s been hard to keep the faith and hope that those ideals we held forty years ago would ever reach fruition. That every American citizen has a chance to become president, and every family deserves to live decently by the fruits of their labor. The belief that we should be represented as a nation by someone who actually believes in equality for all--black and white, men and women, rich and poor.
It has been hard not to become completely jaded and just give up hope. But last night I saw a convention hall full of hope and it fanned my spark back to a flame. Regardless of the election turnout, we have seen history. We have seen that American people are still hungry for change, and are willing to work together to break down barriers from our past. In the words of CNN contributor Donna Brazile, “When we were kids, our parents would tell us we could grow up to be anything we wanted to be. We giggled because we knew certain doors were closed. After this historic year, those gates are now wide open. So this is an exciting moment for the entire country."
God bless America.