To my precious perfect children,
I would like you to understand, someday, when you are a little bit older, what an important day it is today. You are very lucky kids, for lots of reasons, but one of the best reasons to be a kid right now is that the first president that you will remember in your lifetime will Barack Hussein Obama. To me and daddy, and to your grandmas and grandpas, this is a very unusual name for a president to have. But, like a 70-degree November day, it’s not unusual to you. There are things in this world that you take for granted, and I hope you always will be able to. I want you to understand, though, why this day is so significant because I think it is important to be grateful for our blessings.
It is remarkable to me that you have friends who were born in China, India, and Poland. You have an aunt who was born in Mexico, a cousin who is Austrian, and a soon-to-be uncle who is a Syrian Kurd. Your world is filled with people with different colored skin and different ways of speaking. You both notice physical differences, but you point them out in ways that are entirely descriptive, with no shade of judgment attached to your observations. “The doctor had brown skin” you will say, or “The police officer is a lady.” What I would like you to understand is that there are still people alive who remember when women didn’t have the right to vote, or who heard their parents talk about life under slavery. Grandpa remembers having friends in high school who weren’t allowed to swim in the same pool as he was because they had brown skin. Can you imagine not being allowed to play with your friends who have different colored skin? What if I told you that Asher or Ella or Max wasn’t allowed to go to the beach or the playground with us? Can you imagine how Asher, Ella, and Max would feel? That is what life was like for your grandpas and grandmas and their friends when they were growing up.
When daddy and I were kids, in the places where we grew up, there were no specific rules against brown people going where white people went. But we didn’t really have friends or classmates who looked much different than we did. When we were kids, we didn’t have many teachers, doctors, or ministers who had brown skin or different-sounding names. This isn’t something that I will complain about; I don’t have the right to complain about it. I wasn’t the one being shut out of opportunities. Once I was old enough to make my own decisions, I could have sought out more opportunities to meet other kinds of people than those with whom I went to school or who lived in my neighborhood. You will not have to seek these opportunities. They will come to you. Your world will be a place of diversity and openness. You will have the opportunity to choose your friends and colleagues based on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. Your lives will be, are being, enhanced by the incipient fruition of Dr. King’s dream.
I am so happy for you, and for me, and for all of us. So I celebrated today in a quiet way. I took a walk to the lake. The sun is shining and it’s still 70 degrees, just like it was yesterday, which is very unusual for November in northern Illinois. You haven’t lived through enough Novembers in Chicago to know that it shouldn’t be 70 degrees. I am choosing to view the weather optimistically today – I am choosing hope – and seeing it as a divine sign that we are at the dawn of a bright and shining new era rather than as evidence of global warming. The older I get the more I believe that the world presents us with signs and benchmarks, hints that we are on the right track or the wrong track. We just need to be open and alert to them, ask God to help us understand them, and trust our instincts.
On a typical day, I would have gone running, but I’m not crazy about running –it’s more a chore than recreation for me - and I want to enjoy this day as much as possible. As I was walking through the fallen leaves, I still saw some Obama yard signs, but all the other political signs were gone. One of the Obama signs had a yellow happy face Mylar balloon tied to it. This sight made me laugh and peer into the house with the sign in front of it, hoping to make contact with its owner to share a thumbs-up or a fist bump. It also made me cry a little bit.
I am a happy crier- I cry more easily from elation than from sadness - and I have been welling up on and off all day today. Oprah made me sob this morning with her “Hope Won” tee shirt and her exuberance. I don’t usually watch Oprah, but I saw her crying on TV last night while she watched Barack Obama give his acceptance speech at the rally in Grant Park and I made a point of watching her show today because I knew she would be celebrating. I was envious when a CNN anchorwoman spoke today about her neighborhood in New York City, where neighbors previously unknown to each other spontaneously came outside for a celebration when the victory was announced last night. Lake Bluff is no New York, but your dad and I did get to celebrate with some of our friends at an election party, where we hugged and cried and watched spellbound as Obama made his acceptance speech. As is typical of me, I wasn’t able to fully enjoy the moment. I felt a little numb, and I couldn’t quite believe the election was over. It takes me awhile to process happiness, so today is when the happiness is really taking hold.
Watching Oprah today made me think about the class she taught when I was in business school. She taught at Northwestern for two years, in between tapings of her show. Everyone, of course, wanted to take her class, even though we made fun of ourselves for being so frivolous. I was one of the lucky ones who got in. We had guest speakers every week, most of whom were A-list celebrities in the worlds of business and politics. Coretta Scott King was one of these guests. I wish I could remember exactly what she said, but I do remember the sense of calm confidence she exuded, and how much more impressed everyone in the class was by her than by the Fortune 500 CEOs who also spoke. One of my proudest possessions is the final paper that I wrote for that class, on which Oprah herself wrote margin comments and an “A”. I am a sucker for smart celebrities. My other proudest possession is a pair of t-shirts signed by the entire lineup of Wilco, whose songs make me swoon, and my favorite brush with fame was my encounter with Maya Angelou (you’ll learn who she is soon enough). I couldn’t care less about Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt, but I stutter and blush in the presence of eloquence (ironic, isn't it?).
I learned from Oprah’s class the best leaders are visionary, inclusive, and empowering to the people around them, with the highest expectations of themselves and others. I believe that this describes our new president-elect. Barack’s campaign inspired people to take ownership and feel like a part of history, to feel as if those of us who supported him had some control over our country’s future. Our destiny would no longer be dictated by a small group of shadowy, powerful men, which is the way it’s been for the last eight years, since before either of you was born. Daddy and I, your grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, we were all inspired to knock on doors, make phone calls, and donate money and supplies to the campaign, and we all feel like we played a small part in moving history forward. This makes Obama’s victory even sweeter for us. We feel proud, not just of our country and our city, where Obama learned to be a civic leader, but of ourselves.
I am happy for you that you will be able to take some things for granted. You will see yourselves as citizens of the world, not only citizens of our country. And, you will have, I hope, many reasons to be proud of your country. Your native worldviews will be inclusive, not exclusive or divisive. As you grow, though, I hope that you will be vigilant and critical of the signs of divisiveness that has characterized our world in the past. I want you to learn about history so that you can avoid its mistakes. And I want you to always behave in a way that makes you proud of yourselves, because real pride can only come from inside of yourself, from doing what you know is right, not from what you see when you look in the mirror.
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