Caucus, Seattle, WA Joshua Trujillo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It is the first time in my life I can remember feeling a part of a movement.
After the Obama Rally in Key Arena, I turn to my friend and say, "I felt my identity as 'I' slip away, and become part of the group, like I couldn't distinguish any longer where I ended."
"It was that way in the sixties all the time," my friend says.
And I believe her, things in that era seeming much less defended, less critical, less prone to irony. No matter what happens with Obama this movement has been created, it was 21,000 strong in Seattle yesterday, and it's not going away. Amongst the loudest cheers he received: to end the genocide in Darfur, and when he included straights and gays in his groups seeking equality in his government, and when he said George W Bush would no longer be on the ticket.
But it took years of GWB to get us to radicalize. To understand what we might lose when our constitution is altered.
The most punishing photos in Obama's slide show were the ones of Abu Grab. I drew my breath in when I saw it come up on the screen, partly because I was sitting next to my friend's twelve year old granddaughter, and partly because I hadn't yet been hopeful enough to imagine we could undo that damage. My friend cried, her grief coming to the surface. "We had to push some of this away, in order to go on," I say.
Desmond Tutu says forgiveness starts with an admission of the wrongdoing. Neither Bush or Cheney seem likely to stand for impeachment, and so who is going to admit this horrific wrong? Did it, indeed start with us? When we stayed in confusion on the facts instead of confronting? When our Thanksgiving dinners turned to silence when we couldn't understand how peace and war could share the same table?
It left me wondering: As Dr. Martin Luther King said, as Barack Obama quotes in his speeches, how can I "confront the fierce urgency of now?" And how have I been unwilling to confront it since the reign of fear mongering in this country?
In America, when we don't have the courage to do something, we say we don't have enough time. We're paying the mortgage, raising the kids, running errands, and mostly not taking care of the piece that holds us together. Maybe because it comes under the name of government, that unwieldly, complex, sometimes corrupt entity that can't hold us, can't describe who we are. But then, we have forgotten that they is us. When Darfur (or Mississippi) is starving, so are we. When those children are going without health care, those are my children too.
My wrongdoing is that I forget another's pain when I'm too busy taking care of the details of my own life. And I'm wise enough now to live as if we all matter, to make choices that lead in that direction.
The movement I saw wasn't a man called Barack Obama. He was standing up there, talking about a plan. But really, it was the sea of hands raised in the air of the mostly young people, there to stand for something else besides politics as usual. They showed up to start the undoing of terrorist politics, to close the torture chambers, to end poverty. The hope that it is possible and not just rhetoric was palpable yesterday. And no matter what candidate comes into office, these people had a taste of what that could feel like. And I predict that they, like myself, won't be going back to their safe, comfortable lives anytime soon. They're Generation Now.
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On February 9, they forecast that double the biggest ever Washington state caucus turnout happened, about 200,000 people showed up, to vote almost 3-1 for Obama. People were shocked at the lines of traffic, the overflowing polling places, the ballots that ran out and had to be used for scrap paper. It is happening!
