Tonight I got to watch the re-airing of the President's eulogy
for Rev. Pickney's funeral as I got back to the hotel after a long day and a
long week of doing my best to give these girls some tools to write songs, some
confidence that music is in everyone and that music is not a competition and
that music can be a way to express our secrets safely and can be a way to heal
ourselves and our communities and can be a way to express joy and love and
there was President Obama, stretching his own comfort zone, stretching from
speech into song, into Amazing Grace, in a speech that was maybe the most
moving oration I've ever heard in my lifetime, a lifetime that started with a
misguided war and a deposed shady President, a lifetime that started in the
year of the summer of love but a childhood under a cynical view of leaders and
politics, names of the dead scrolling down the TV screen, long lines to get
gas, a hostage crisis, a shooting of a president, the live explosion of the
Space Shuttle on the TV in my Algebra class, my first vote being for someone
for whom I didn't even really care except his Party allegiance, to my 20's when
I could vote for someone I did stand behind who was dynamic and, in the end,
completely disappointed me personally, not in his very human failing but in his
equivocations which were insulting, to personally watching the Towers fall from
the edge of the Hudson River and the dust of the debris gave me a bronchitis I
couldn't kick for months, and a President who hovered over a darkness and
deceit for 8 awful years and my cynicism grow until the day in 2007 when I
heard that Obama had won while I was in a meditation retreat and away from cell
phones and computers and television and had to celebrate silently, tears
streaming down my face, to tonight, to this morning, to this heavily weighted
gorgeously poignant week. A President of half a different skin color than my
own with a middle name that made me think his election would be impossible in this
very divided nation. A President of my own generation. A President who had a
checklist of things to do when he arrived in 2008 and has sometimes slowly and
sometimes quickly checked things off that list. A President who miraculously
passed an affordable healthcare act that has allowed me to be able to have
affordable healthcare and not go bankrupt trying to beat my asthma each winter.
A President who paved the way for the Supreme Court today to rule that marriage
is a right for every person, every citizen. A President who eulogized a man
shot down by a racist and who sang "Amazing Grace". This day I want
to remember my friend Dave Stefano, who came out to me my sophomore year of
college, and, when I said, "oh, yeah, that's cool" he said to me,
"No, I know it makes you uncomfortable and if you want to ask me any
questions, let's do it" and he took me to an all night diner in Florence,
MA and we sat up till dawn eating pancakes so I could ask him questions about
how he knew, when did he know which honestly was the door that opened me from
being ignorant and fearful of the unknown to being curious and open. And today
I have spent this day unabashedly emotional in my patriotism. I did not think
in my lifetime I'd ever see something like this. And by "something like
this" I mean all of it.
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