“Few of us will have the will to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” ROBERT F. KENNEDY “I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.” MALCOLM X Monday, November 8, 2004 I have sat in my Brooklyn, New York, apartment quietly, for several days now, too perplexed to talk with people, friends or not, about the American presidential election. I have read mainstream and alternative news accounts of the campaign, absorbed statistics and exit polls, sifted through the debates, flipped between CNN and the Fox News Channel, dodged most emails and phone calls coming my way, asking what I thought it meant that President George W. Bush had won, that Senator John Kerry had lost. I have heard the chorus of Bush supporters say it was Mr. Bush’s “faith” that led them to punch the hole, to pull the lever, to touch the screen for the president-elect. And I have heard the chorus of Kerry patrons say they feel robbed, that there must be some vast conservative conspiracy, that they are deeply traumatized, in a state of shock, that they know neither what to do next, nor to whom to turn. I have spoken with my mother, who has voted in every election since she has been able to, since the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, and who, with her sharp South Carolina accent and uncomplicated front-porch observations on the world, has always given me something to ponder. My mother, like me, is a lifelong Democrat and her sleepy response was dry, nonchalant, uncharacteristically melancholic: “Boy,” she said, “at least we got the chance to vote.” Indeed, mother, indeed. But has it come to this? To real democracy, real freedom, real self-determination being tied solely to our right to vote? Is the vote it? Twenty years ago, when I was an eighteen-year-old first-year college student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the vote was the thing. I was stirred by a Southern Baptist preacher named Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm had run for president in 1972, was the only other serious Black candidate for president my community has ever had. Reverend Jackson encouraged us-young and old alike-to keep hope alive. And told us that we were, in fact, somebody, and we believed him, believed that our vote could, would, matter. President Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide that year, but by 1988, when Rev. Jackson ran once more for president and came in second in the Democratic primary to eventual nominee Michael Dukakis, many of us felt that Rev. Jackson, with those millions of Rainbow Coalition votes, had the power, the juice, to represent a new American coalition of progressive people-Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, labor, city and country folks, working class people, middle class people humane enough to care about their neighbors to the left and right, and all those groups that had been marginalized during the Reagan-Bush years. It was, we felt then, an opportunity to win back the soul of the Democratic Party, to have a party, an organization that truly reflected the diversity, the “gorgeous mosaic,” as former New York City mayor David Dinkins was fond of saying, of America. But, alas, and for reasons only Rev. Jackson knows to this day, a great compromise was struck: the Rainbow Coalition was allowed to wither on an ashen vine in exchange for Rev. Jackson’s seemingly cozy relationship with the Democratic Party hierarchy, and many of us young folks became disillusioned with politics for years to come. I was 22, I was one of those people who walked away from politics in 1988, and stayed away right through the Clinton years, in spite of Mr. Clinton’s youthful appeal and Kennedyesque affectations. Yet I never stopped voting. I could not fathom that inaction. My mother chided me, habitually, that there was a time when we, African Americans, could not vote, that I had an obligation to do so for no other reason than that blood, literally, had been spilled, that heads had been smashed, literally, so that I could have a semblance of citizenship in these times. I write all of this to say it hurt me, immensely, to see so many young Americans throughout America registering to vote for the first time, volunteering for Mr. Kerry’s campaign, standing in lines in some areas for up to ten hours to cast their vote, then dealing with the harsh reality that their candidate had lost. It hurt me to see their tears of defeat, to hear the echoes of “Hey, it does not matter what we do, nothing is ever going to change.” There was a sense of confusion, of hopelessness permeating young America, older America, Democratic America, liberal America, progressive America. Many people believed that MTV, BET, Rock the Vote, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, Russell Simmons, Oprah Winfrey, P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, Eminem, Michael Moore, and other popular and well-meaning institutions and icons could, and would, make a difference. People believed that because of the Iraqi war, the horrible economy, the outsourcing of American jobs, the ugly partitions that have been erected on our soil during the Bush-Cheney years-Black vs. White, White vs. people of color, Christian vs. Muslim, Americans vs. Arabs, poor vs. rich, straight vs. gay, and so on-that there was no imaginable way that Mr. Bush could get reelected. Many of us assumed, hoped, prayed that John Kerry, though a mediocre candidate at best, would somehow win this election and get America back on the course of figuring itself out, for the good of us all. But perhaps this is where our mistake began. We placed more faith in one person, Senator John Kerry, than we placed in ourselves. When Mr. Bush […]
