HISTORIC

It’s not gonna be easy. The rightwingers, including the ones who comment on this blog, are going to throw so many lies and distortions at this guy, and the media will step all over themselves, as they already have, to let McCain off the hook on his flip flops and mistakes and “misstatements” and support of junior, then jump on the Fox bandwagon every time the rightwing makes up a claim or blows something out of proportion.

But it’s still so historic that right now I don’t care. Including Hilary’s speech today supporting Obama and pointing out the changes their campaigns have already brought about, if only to prove to the faint hearted and doubters that an awful lot of people in this country are ready for change.

Watching her speech I was moved, no matter how much she and her campaign disappointed me over the past several weeks and more, because what her candidacy stands for, and most of what she said, is moving. When my mother was young. God rest her soul, women couldn’t vote, as Hilary pointed out. When I was young, African Americans weren’t able to vote in much of the South, much less go to a restaurant or movie theater etc. down there, and up here there were only a hand full of black politicians.

The rightwingers get all teary eyed over the flag, sometimes the Confederate flag, and a kind of patriotism that often doesn’t include a lot of the rest of us, especially if we don’t agree with them. And when some of us get teary eyed over the prospect of this country finally getting beyond race and gender and all the other categorizing that diminishes our potential to be the country of the future we now and then have been, they call us “America haters” and worse.

But there’s no going back.

Though even if Obama wins, the rightwingers won’t go gently into that good night, they will do everything they can to make an Obama administration fail (as they did Carter and tried to Clinton) but they can’t change the historic reality of this moment.

And though sometime in the future, when it will be commonplace to see African-Americans and Hispanics and Asians and all the other categories that exist or have been made up, and of any gender, running for president and winning, there will be Republicans that will try to pretend that they were a part of and even started this trend, but we’ll know better.

Meanwhile, don’t let them get away with disparaging Obama and all he stands for and has accomplished, including inspiring an entire generation to get involved in politics and fill them with hope that their time has come (as JFK did for many of us and RFK was doing when he was cut down, a comparison rightwingers will dismiss because the kind of inspiration Obama delivers threatens their longheld belief in getting and holding power no matter the cost to the rest of us).