Tomorrow we will have a new President. It is incredible being in DC for this historic event. I arrived on Amtrak after 14 hours on a train that originated in Chicago. A train full of people as excited and as hopeful as I am. Everyone believes this man can change the world. Everyone wants him to be successful. The sense that our country can once again live up to its founders’ vision, that it can live up to the rest of the world’s expectations of us, is palpable. A new generation of leadership is about to move into the Oval Office and young people feel that anything is possible, that all the mistakes of past generations and of the previous administration can be corrected. The time is now!
But for me, the sense of hope, the desire to believe things can be different is tempered by a deeply suppressed feeling of dread. Fear, really.
I remember a very similar feeling of hopefulness around the 1960 election of John Kennedy. Perhaps the sense of possibility, the sense of hopefulness and the belief that it was possible to fundamentally change the world as we knew it was enhanced by being Catholic and attending a parochial school, but I remember the feeling very well. With the election of JFK anything seemed possible.
I had just turned 13 and was in the eighth grade when President Kennedy was assassinated. The sixties raged around me during high school and college. Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ultimate horror, the death of all hope with the assassination of Bobbie Kennedy. I think all of us who experienced the sixties during those formative years were damaged. I’m working really hard to overcome the disillusionment and cynicism that is a part of me.
I want to believe that a majority white country that can elect a black man as its President is a different country than the violent and hate filled one that I grew up in. I want to believe that the sixties are in our past and cannot be repeated. There should never be another generation of American youth exposed to the worst of human nature, to Americans attacking their own democracy, killing their fellow countrymen.
So my sense of hope is tempered by a knot in my stomach, that place that holds the memory of that decade deep inside and the effort to keep it there, to hold it in is almost painful. As much as I am looking forward to tomorrow, to hearing President Obama’s Inaugural address, to the ceremony, to the many balls and especially to the Out for Equality Ball that we will be attending, really, I think I just want it to be over. I want the swearing in to be official and the Obama’s safely in the White House.
I want to believe that we can be a country in touch with our better angels, that we are ready and able to pursue a course of fairness and peace. I know we can be, I guess. But I wonder if we will be? Hope lives but fear is not far away.
