What a crazy, crazy thing it is to reflect on the resonance of tonight in history-and the vibrations of history bouncing back through tonight.
The grey heads of venerable punditry are quite right to reflect on this moment in our history, as are the Civil Rights Warriors who were there, and ones before who's torch they carried.
The thing is that for most people of my age, and younger, this has never been a black or white issue, but something more pragmatic, and profound: If one person in our society is denied equal rights, then we are all denied equal rights.
Certainly, my generation, or the one after, does not have a lock on the wisdom it takes to negotiate the labrythine nature of racism as it characterizes that most basic of human rights: Identity. We do not have the inherent genius to fix this all in one electoral swoop.
What we do have is an individual who is supremely talented and intelligent enough help us disentangle the mess that the right wing has created, and continues to foster via talk radio and talk news.
The bamboozling thing about race is that its most virulent practioners, for all the pretzel logic of conspiracy, can never grasp the irreducible skeptical first step: Who benefits from this?
The answer was, and is, old rich white guys. Not the working class white guys. Not poor blacks. Not even Jews. It is always old rich white guys who benefit from racism as a clever distraction, while they rob the till.
The disentangling of this is not disentangling of "racism" persay, but the pursuit of social justice as a end in and of itself, the recognition that if a city, state or nation can fuck over one group, what's to say that they won't come after the rest of us.
So tonight, while you are watching Barack Obama make history, and while you are watching the right wing come at the whole thing, knives out, like the smart ass frat boys they are (or wanna be, for that matter) pretending that its all utopian nonsense, all in the imagination, and we're all a bunch of ________________(insert insulting label) liberals, remember that it is the failure of the imagination that assumes that it must always be such (because it must not-democracy is always becoming), or, rather, the dark imagination called paranoia that has brought us to this precipice.
Remember that some imaginings are beautiful. Remember that our great republic existed first as the imagining of a collective genius, and that all great leaps start as leaps of the imagination.
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