New Year's Day!

It's not January 1st, but it sure feels like it. There was no big cheer let out at the stroke of midnight. Well, at least not midnight here in California. Perhaps it was midnight in Chile or Argentina or some place like that, but here in the City of Oak, it was at precisely 8pm PST that Barack Obama was first announced as the winner of the 2008 United States Presidential election. What a monumental moment this was but I found myself strangely unable to react. On the inside, I was all at once relieved and skeptical, elated yet subdued.

Sure, this might be called "typical Destah", failing to appropriately react or show any emotion and scarcely a pulse in the face of some earth shattering news or event. I'd done it so many times before. Why would this be any different? When my first born child arrived into the world, I could only stare at her in disbelief. Even when they handed her to me and she stared back at me with the same quizzical expression, it was still quite the surreal experience. I sat there in front of the television screen watching Wolfe Blitzer proudly announce that the junior Senator from Illinois was being projected by CNN as the presumptive President elect and could scarcely crack a smile. I felt like one of those inmates that had been wrongly accused of some heinous crime that got them sentenced to 20 years, of which they had already served 17, as they sit in the courtroom and are suddenly exonerated of all charges as some new evidence is finally brought to light. On the one hand, you're partly relieved, but on the other, such a price was paid that the cynicism remains. How can you celebrate something that should've been allowed to happen long ago? Well, perhaps I wasn't that bad, but my face probably said as much.

I never thought I'd see this day. I mean, I did but...well, you know. In my teens, if someone asked what I thought I might be when I grew up, with a straight face that would impress the director of a funeral home, I might say that I might be president. I thought I was a pretty smart guy. People liked me. I like people. I appreciate the differences and nuances that all of the cultures that reside here in this country and respect and admire the ones that I've had the pleasure of encountering outside it. I could be President. But in actuality it was just something to say. It was more like an affirmation that made me feel good and spoke to the high self confidence that I had growing up.

It's not that I didn't think I wasn't good enough it's just that it hadn't been done before, and the odds against my success were astronomical. Such things didn't bother me though. I like to think that I'll be successful at anything upon which I set my sights. I was president of the microcosm of society known as junior high, so who's to say I couldn't have continued upon that track, against all odds.

The audacity of youth is that bold. Young people don't have the wisdom of experience to know any better most of the time. They haven't had to come face to face with segregation or second class treatment. They haven't been profiled or marginalized. Their world has been pretty fair for the short time that they've been aware of such things as fairness. That audacity led me to do the unthinkable, at least according to my peers, by running for vice-president as a 7th grader, just one week after stepping on to the campus of a new school, naive about such things as the social hierarchy and the who's who around those parts. I made a surprisingly good showing too. I wasn't surprised, but most others were. I didn't win, but I was appointed a position on the board and eventually ascended to one of the executive offices after the misdeeds of one of the social elite forced them to resign their post. But that was so long ago. My pursuits have led me in different directions since then and perhaps society's unwritten rules have subtly shaped my attitude so that I don't think about such grandiose things as being President. Somewhere along the way I was conditioned to get in line, like a good laborer and be a very small part of the machine, master of only my very minute domain. Paying mortgages and making ends meet have become paramount to my existence. It's as if I'm looking at life through a television camera upon which someone has taken a Sharpie and written HOA fees, car note, groceries, credit card debt, personal health and well being in bold black ink so as to obscure the bigger picture beyond the lens, making it all run together into one big out of focus nothingness.

Caught up in that nothingness are things like big dreams and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. The pursuit of happiness has been lauded, but not happiness itself. Sooner or later the futility of that pursuit can get to be so overwhelming that you almost become numb to it all. I think that's partially where I was at 8pm PST tonight. In my mind, Barack Obama was so supremely qualified, like no other candidate that this country has seen before, that it was almost a waste to time to continue campaigning. To hold a contest in which one candidate was so overmatched seemed like a formality that we could all do without. In any other circumstance, the decision would be what's commonly termed as a no-brainer.

If you were Coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke University and you could have a valedictorian, Eagle Scout, that volunteers at the senior center in his free time and oh, just so happens to be 7 feet tall and the most graceful and dominating center to play the high school game since one Lewis Alcindor sprinted down the court for New York City's Power Memorial High School, you'd stop at nothing to get that kid enrolled at your esteemed institution of higher learning. If you owned a restaurant and needed a chef to distinguish your establishment and exalt it above all other dining options and the most creative and easiest to work with chef were available, you'd snatch that chef out faster than he could flip a flapjack.If you were a corporation trying to fill an important position and you had an opportunity to hire the top individual from the top university in all of the land, you would not hesitate to do so. Only in Presidential politics was this type of logic put into question, and actually seen as a negative.

It would seem that if Barack Obama, the President of the Harvard Law Review while a student there (which, by the way pretty much distinguishes him as the DUDE of dudes at the nation's finest law school), who just so happens to be a man of African descent, had been denied his rightful place as leader of the Free World that there could be no more devastating blow to a people that have suffered so many indignities and disappointments throughout the 232 year history of this country. But in some strange way, that statement would not have been entirely true. Sure, it would've been incredibly discouraging for the morale of anyone that ever dared to dream, that ever dared to believe. However, the cynicism amongst black people in this country runs so deep that many including myself would not have been surprised.

It is for that reason that I could not bring myself to celebrate, let alone be even outwardly relieved when he was announced as the winner of the 2008 Presidential Race. I had watched in disbelief when candidates that neither looked like me, nor were likely ever a victim of racism like me were cheated out of crucial electoral votes that cost them the Commander-in-Chief's position in the White House. While my faith in the great system of democracy that this country takes such pride in was all but shaken into oblivion, I was able to rationalize it into something as callous as "Well, they're doing it to each other now. Now they must know how we feel most of the time." But it wasn't personal. Barack Obama's candidacy was personal to me. I have never met the man, but I feel like I have. I have never spoken to the man, but I feel as though he speaks for me. I have never sat down and had the opportunity to learn of his deepest fears and ambitions, but I would bet that they are similar to mine.

I dismissed Wolfe Blitzer and Diane Sawyer and all the rest of the media that proclaimed that Obama would be the next President of the United States. Until the MAN took the mic and admitted that he had indeed been defeated by the BETTER man, I had decided that I wouldn't really listen. To his credit, John McCain gave a very eloquent concession speech that actually served as a nice segue to the positivity and hope for change that will be ushered in with Barack Obama.

I must admit that I still was relatively speechless when McCain spoke but felt like the smile that had developed deep down inside me was beaming like a spotlight for all to see, written all over my face. It was tough to put into words how great a feeling it was to realize that he, that WE had actually done it. When I woke up today, it almost didn't seem real. It was as if yesterday were New Year's Eve and we had all had a grand celebration, no, a positively EPIC celebration and at some point I had fallen asleep and now awakened after the streamers and party favors had all been cleaned up. Gone was the flash and excitement and the energy of last night's festivities. But the sun was shining so brightly with the promise of a new year ripe with new resolutions and opportunities for change that I knew that something special had indeed taken place.