after i voted i almost cried. i was so tired and happy and felt a little bit like whatever was wrong in my life, it would be okay, i just did such a good and important and historical thing. i kept thinking about right after i moved to galesburg and seeing for the first time obama bumper stickers and signs and knowing several people who worked on his senate campaign and thinking, oh my god, this guy! he is important. and almost a year after he talked about galesburg in his speech at the democratic national convention of 2004, he said these things at knox:
Here in Galesburg, the main depot for the Underground Railroad in Illinois, escaped slaves could roam freely on the streets and take shelter in people’s homes. And when their masters or the police would come for them, the people of this town would help them escape north, some literally carrying them in their arms to freedom.
Think about the risks that involved. If they were caught abetting a fugitive, you could’ve been jailed or lynched. It would have been simple for these townspeople to turn the other way; to go live their lives in a private peace.
And yet, they didn’t do that. Why?
Because they knew that we were all Americans; that we were all brothers and sisters; the same reason that a century later, young men and women your age would take Freedom Rides down south, to work for the Civil Rights movement. The same reason that black women would walk instead of ride a bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry and cleaning somebody else’s kitchen. Because they were marching for freedom.
Today, on this day of possibility, we stand in the shadow of a lanky, raw-boned man with little formal education who once took this stage at Old Main and told the nation that if anyone did not believe the American principles of freedom and equality, that those principles were timeless and all-inclusive, they should go rip that page out of the Declaration of Independence.
My hope for all of you is that as you leave here today, you decide to keep these principles alive in your own life and in the life of this country. You will be tested. You won’t always succeed. But know that you have it within your power to try. That generations who have come before you faced these same fears and uncertainties in their own time. And that through our collective labor, and through God’s providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that distant horizon, and a better day.
and maybe it’s stupid or hokey, but i think that a better day, if it hasn’t been today, is coming sooner than we might know. even just to wake up and think that maybe this one day will not for once be worse than the last. i just feel with all of my heart that he knows. he knows the things that i know about the world and the weight of history and then so much more because i don’t know very much yet. he has seen the exact things that i have seen that have changed and re-changed my mind over and over again and made me feel like i’m not powerless to change anymore. i don’t think the country has changed overnight, and i am not willing to be completely happy over the fact that for the time being we have defeated racism and a lot of weird abortion politics in spite of elevating hatred, inequality and a fear of privacy, sexuality and love that is so cowardly and gross. and i don’t think he is perfect but i know he is good and that is enough for me and the entire world right now.
