I was born in 66. I am a disabled woman. I have never married. I am straight. I went to college. I have a successful career and am well regarded by my peers. I own my own home although it, like so many, is threatened by the Foreclosure crisis sweeping through this nation. Much of what I am I worked hard to accomplish but most of what I am comes from this country and the opportunities that it offered.
And I look around now and see that this is not the country I grew up with.
We have a president who has altered the balance of power for his own gain.
We are having a national debate at the highest levels about torture as a state policy.
We have broken the Geneva Conventions; standards of common decency that we (among others) established for the good of all nations and the soldiers who offered their lives to support them.
When one of our greatest cities and most productive ports was destroyed by an awesome act of nature, our government has, still - years after it happened, floundered and failed to take steps to remedy or revitalize that community.
Our emails, our telephone calls are monitored by our own government.
Our president has stymied Stem Cell research - the clearest direction to prevent or cure diabetes, organ transplants and so many other perilous health conditions.
We are far along a perilous path.
This is not the country I grew up in.
While I am not religious, I first heard of Obama from his Call To Renewalspeech he gave about faith on June 28, 2006 and the need to accept and welcome it into our political process. It was a speech that was not well received here at DailyKos. But I understood and honored his desire to accept all faiths and recognized that regardless of your politics, a relationship with faith offered one of the most beneficial and generous resources to our communities. Many of our founding fathers were church elders and pastors, ministers and preachers. Our relationship with God, whatever god, is one of the most personal and powerful. To mock and deride it in our political process is to rob ourselves of one of our greatest strengths. And I am not religious.
I went to see him speak in Oakland on March 17, 2007. It was spring, sunny and bright but freezing. He's a tall man, so skinny as to be emaciated. As I listened to him, drinking in his thoughts, watching the faces of the people around me, I scanned the roofs of the buildings around us and worried for his safety. I feared he might be robbed from us. I still do.
This nation needs him.
He has been a community activist, a civil rights attorney, a constitutional scholar.
He will challenge us, he will counsel us, he will guide us to change and inspire us to hope.
This nation needs him.
Can You find the orange box I used to show where I was in the photo? lol
Another shot from my seat. Handicapped Seating, Baby - it's the silver lining to the cloud. :-)
By lafemmoi at 2008-02-06