I’m not referring to the amount of time it has taken me to update my blog.
I’m talking about change.
For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of immense possibility. The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the US presidency is a landmark moment. Like so many of us, throughout the world, we were struck, unsure of how to believe this moment could be true. I remembered an Arab man who spoke to us, a group of Fulbright educators in Israel a little over a year ago, a professor from the Negev Desert… that our country’s own racism test would be what happened to Obama in the presidential election. And who could believe it–we passed. That doesn’t mean we’re finished–far from it, but the scope of possibility has just opened up, as if we are on the edge of discovering an entire new dimension to the universe.
In real terms, after the hugs I exchanged with colleagues in my department at an election night party, many of them people of color for whom this election holds perhaps even deeper meaning, I drove home, holding back tears all the way.
The following morning I was on the way to the middle school where advisory has become a regular part of the schoolweek. The plan I had crafted was a debriefing that each teacher would do with students about the advisory. I crested a hill, a vast purplish Texas horizon before me, and I was overwhelmed. These students, almost all African American and Mexican, would know that concretely this country is ready to be led by a man of color.
In advisory, the children were heavily engaged and curious to make more sense of the election. First and foremost, they understood this was the US’s first African American president. They knew Obama’s daughters would get a new puppy. They wondered what Obama would do first; they even asked how the world would change. That question itself hadn’t occurred to me as such, and the quiet girl who shared it with me humbled me. So much possibility. They knew this was the US’s 44th president, and most of them had stayed awake the previous night following the election news.
And there’s still work to do. I need to write more lesson plans for next week’s advisory. I have a paper due on Monday. I’m frustrated by California’s vote to ban gay marriage, worried about a soaring unemployment rate, a world still full of inequality. But we may just be on the edge of a new kind of world, one in which our better selves create a better world.
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