For eight long years I struggled with a sense of creeping horror that I had somehow slipped into some phantasmagorical mirror-image of my country. I wondered if I really was real honest-to-god American, or if I had somehow wandered into this hateful, hate-filled, venomous place by mistake. It was, in short, an eight-year-long waking nightmare. I felt trapped by the insanity of the Bush years, and angry at my helpless desire for an American Restoration, one in which our most treasured intellectual and political ideals might be reinvigorated.
I knew in my heart that this was not the country of my birth, that mine was a better place than the freak show we'd become. I missed the country my father had taught me to believe in, and I despaired that we would ever recover even a semblance of what we were. I almost left for good. But a little part of me hated to give up, to confess that the America I'd grown up in was nothing but a mirage. And so I stayed.
Last night was my vindication. It was my father's, too.
My father taught me at a very young age that all humankind was equal, the same biological race. Science, he said, had established that my blood and his blood and the blood of the black lady who cleaned our house and baby sat me was the same. That established the folly of racism once and for all, and vindicated the the justice of the civil rights movement, which he supported wholeheartedly.
Dad was a civil engineer who had his own office in my home town. He tried a partnership once in the early 1960s, while I was still a toddler. My older sister remembers that experiment very well, and this is the story she told me about that business relationship. Early in the partnership, on payday, Dad left the responsibility for giving the draftsmen their checks to the new partner. One of the draftsmen was black. The partner dropped the check on the floor at that gentleman's feet, thus avoiding putting it into a black man's hand. Dad told the draftsman, "Do NOT pick that up." He then pulled the new partner aside and insisted that he pick that check up off the floor, apologize to the draftsman and hand it to him properly. The partner refused, and by the end of the weekend, he wasn't my dad's partner any more. But the draftsman continued to work for my father until Dad closed his office a couple of years before he died of lung cancer in 1971. I like to think that he would have been as steadfast in defending the humanity of American Muslims and Arab-Americans, who have been treated with such suspicion here since 2001.
Dad married my mother right after WW2, and in doing so married into a family of Dixiecrats. When my maternal grandparents waxed indignant about Dr. King's claims about Georgia jail conditions, Dad would argue with them that there was actually a great deal wrong with the treatment of African-Americans in the South, in every aspect of civic life. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would have horrified him, and I think he would have seen those institutions as betrayals of our core principles.
It was hatefulness, prejudice and bigotry that my father most loathed in this world, and he believed that America could achieve a more just society, a color-blind society. Dr. King's assassination caused him great sorrow, but he never evinced any fear of blacks in the agonizing days that followed. He so believed in the basic decency of his black fellow citizens that he couldn't even see why walking alone in the evening in the summer of 1969 to the corner store in Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins Hospital, for a pint of milk might be dangerous. The divisiveness of the last several years would have broken Dad's heart as surely as it did mine. A Navy veteran and life-long Reservist, he would have been appalled by the hatefulness of McCain's campaign even as the slogan "country first" was bandied about.
Obama's landslide victory last night would have given him so much joy, as much as it did my sister, my nephew ( a chip off the old block if ever there was one), and me. And I think that he would agree with us that last night was indeed the vindication of all our hopes and dreams. It's not just that we achieved this historic first black American President-elect, although that would have deeply gratified him. It is that, finally, an overwhelming majority of Americans rejected the politics of hate, fear, division and demonization. It is that which is the vindication of everything he taught his daughters to believe about their country and fellow citizens and it marks, at long last, the beginning of the American Restoration.