Awakening

I spent the day with my friend in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, walking the streets of a lower, lower middle class neighborhood, making sure that every self-professed Democrat had voted or had a way and a plan to get to the polls. We were warned at Campaign Headquarters that the neighborhood we were headed to was full of "rednecks" who might "harass" us with racial invective. I have always hated the word "redneck," had a visceral reaction to it as ugly and classist and mean. However, after hearing a few choice epithets today, I decided that if used to describe a raging bigot, it's perfectly okay.

And as we walked, we encountered some rednecks, some lost souls, some raised middle fingers from behind lace curtains, and some very angry, teeth-baring guard dogs. We saw NRA stickers and posters, several men in military garb, the by now familiar plastic children's pails full of cigarette butts on porches and lawns. But at each house we approached, we encountered citizens, Democrats and Republicans and Independents, who had exercised their right to vote and voted for Barack Obama.

Most people we met had already voted. I couldn't wait, was a common sentiment. We were there before the polls opened, another. You folks again? another still. To my shock, at many of the homes we'd been assigned to stop at, there was evidence of one or two or even three previous visits by Obama campaign workers over the previous days. When I heard this evening on ABC that 59% of Pennsylvania voters were contacted by the Obama campaign IN PERSON--not over the phone or by mail or email but by an actual human being--I was both blown away and somehow not surprised. There were a lot of familiar faces out there on the streets today.

I will never forget this election cycle. I feel awakened as a citizen, as a member of society, as an American. I have always considered myself politically active and patriotic, I have always voted, followed politics, local and national, spoken out on behalf of what I believe. But never before have I left my comfort zone and taken to the streets. This, this is a world in which I want to raise my children. I can never go back. I won't.

I grew up hearing my father talk about waiting late at night as a boy in the freezing cold on his little town green to shake the hand of John F. Kennedy, a man his Jewish immigrant parents believed could speak for them. I grew up hearing my mother talk about marching on Washington with Martin Luther King in defiance of her parents' wishes, the safe confines of her small hometown. Someday, now, I will be able to tell my girls that on the day America finally redeemed itself, I was meeting the Americans who made it happen. I was one of them myself.

Tomorrow is another day. I will wait, along with the rest of the world, to see what kind of a president Barack Obama will turn out to be. My expectations for him are high, exceptionally so. I think he will change the world. I think he already has.