Move On Over, Or We’re Going To Move Over You

(Happy Birthday Jay! – promoted by NLinStPaul)

I turned thirty-two years old today.  And one week from today, I will do something I have never done before: cast my vote for the winning candidate for President of the United States, Senator Barack Obama.  It will be an interesting change to have a President who has my actual endorsement.

It has been an interesting political season, as well.  The prospective election of a multi-racial man to the Presidency has brought out much of the worst of Americans.  All of us are familiar with the reprehensible public statements, the shouted epithets at crowds and rallies, the slanderous emails which many of us have received.  A loud, angry minority perceives that they have lost their grip on the country, and fear what it means for the “Real America”, which they define as excluding me, you and pretty much everyone we know.

All of this has offended many of you; it has offended me as well.  It offends me to hear believers in other political principles than I describe where my friend Summer and her husband and daughter as not being the “real Virginia”, although I imagine that Summer herself was fairly enthusiastic to hear it.  It offends me to hear that my friends and I in New York City are not among the “best of America” because we don’t live in small towns in Republican states.  I may have spent the bulk of my life on the East Coast of the US, but that has not diminished my appreciation for Texas, where my aunt lives, or Louisiana, where my father is from.  Indeed, my political representatives have shared that view as well.  There was no diminished distress when Louisiana, among the “reddest” of states, was drowning from government apathy while the President took time out to celebrate John McCain’s birthday.

Many notable voices have deplored these offensive and divisive remarks.  But I am glad for them, both because sunlight truly is the best disinfectant and because that these voices are so willing to speak openly is proof that they know they are losing, and are desperate because of it.

And in this moment, I want to take a minute to thank all of you.

In 1968, shortly before the Democratic Convention in Chicago and shortly after the riots that had ensued after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., reporters were granted access to the special training sessions Mayor Daley had ordered for the police.  One of the officers stated to a reporter: “If the fight starts, don’t expect it to last long.  We’ll win in the first round and there won’t be a rematch.”  My father was one of the thousands arrested in Chicago during the convention, a graduate student just trying to get home.  When, on the convention floor, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff deplored the situation, saying that “with George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” Mayor Daley responded by shouting “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”  That was our country, eight years before I was born.

That was our country.  A place where J. Edgar Hoover in his official capacity called Dr. King a communist agent, a Democratic party which elected George Wallace governor three times, where President Nixon could order staffers to make lists of Jews in government employ and staffers would do it.

But you, all of you, changed that.  The fight has lasted a long time, and is by no means over, but none of you let the results of the first rounds dictate the bout.  You made choices to ensure that you lived and raised your children in communities which were integrated with people of many races and cultures, and taught us all, friends, students and family alike, that we would be better off if we understood and believed that people are always people like us, regardless of race, religion, gender or orientation.  You taught me to believe that we can and do make the world a better place most through the small action of being better people.

So, thank you.  Thank you for helping build the world we live in today, and allowing me the opportunity to take part in an important moment in both my personal and our nation’s history.  I am grateful and proud.  Forty years ago, Stokely Carmichael warned the forces of racism and segregation to “Move on over, or we’re going to move over you.”  Together, we will fulfill that promise.