This election has done more to build that love. I'll be honest, I'm an Obama supporter. Not because I think he's perfect and support every single tenet he espouses, but because he's our best choice right now. But Obama's not why this election has built this affinity of mine. He is:
In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till was 14. He traveled from Chicago to Missouri to spend the vacation time with relatives. Trying to impress his cousins, Emmett whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Her husband took none too kindly to this. Roy Bryant recruited his half-brother to help teach Emmett a lesson.
The two thirty-something-year-old men beat Emmett and gouged out his eyes before shooting him in the head, tying a 75-pound cotton gin around his neck with barb wire and dropping him in the river. His mother insisted on an open casket so that others might see what racism had done to her son.
Now, barely more than half of a century later, the son of a white woman and black man is being endorsed for president by a major political party. And, on the other side of the aisle, we have a woman on a viable ticket. (Sorry, Geraldine Ferraro. You ran with Walter Mondale. Your ticket received about 17 electoral votes. That was never a viable ticket). If we start on my feminist side, this post will never end.
So, my friends, this election has truly brought to light a wave of change in America, regardless of who is on top at the end of the night--and let's hope it's the end of the night, not the end of the month. America has a lot of problems. A lot. And let's be honest, folks: some of our biggest problems come straight from our politicians. However, we've come so far in such a relatively short period of time on so many fronts, and this election shows that.
The only hope I'm clinging on to at this point is that at the end of the night, whoever wins, will take this momentum and keep building.
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