So last week I was on Lexington Avenue by Grand Central in New York City, in the very shadow of the great investment houses and law firms, and saw an American mother out with her daughter begging, frantic, harried, desperate, in a sea of tailored suits and $300 shoes.
In the next few weeks we are all going to be bombarded with the mainstream media's assessment that the Edwards campaign failed because American voters disown his economic populism, do not see themselves in Edwards' depictions of American hardship, find his and his family's story of work and struggle and privation not compelling, but quaint and funny.
Expect it, it will come. And when it does, inevitably from the Larry Kudlows and Bill O'Reillys and the New York Times editorial page, I will visualize again that mother and daughter, clench my eyes shut, and think, remember them.
To have supported John Edwards this past year is to have seen an America that isn't there. It's to look at the unkempt, hollow-eyed man pandhandling outside a bodega and see someone clean and homed and respected, his honorable discharge from our armed forces framed on his new wall. It is to drive through the half-abandoned towns of the rural south and hear hammers and power saws, resucitating a way of life and a people heartbroken and abandoned. It is to imagine windmills soaring like skyscrapers on the prairie, and solar farms stretching through the deserts, all built by men and women eager to regain the dignity of work. It is to imagine all the people now connected to machines and slying slow deaths because their lives are not worth enough today for them to be cured by corporate health care, cured, and well, and happy.
To have supported John Edwards this past year is to see this America, and to have made it our home. Some homes are not there for us to go to and just walk in the door. Some homes we have to build, by imagining it and then bringing it into the world.
So over the next few days and weeks as the DLC, the Economist magazine, Bill Kristol and the rest of the cynics who have never been paid for their sweat, worked a twelve hour day standing, or seen their child truly hungry, say that Edwards' message is dead, we must remember that it is not within their power to end it, only ours. We cannot let them destroy the America that we have made our home.
We have to go out into the world, and work, and build. So that then we can say that though John Edwards lost, his America, the America that we have made our home, won.
Don't despair. The way to our home is longer than the way we've travelled, and the work before us is harder than the work we've done, but despair and complacency is the only thing that can truly defeat us.