In November 2000, in their senior year in high school, the oldest three of our six children began to learn the bitterness of lost elections and lost countries. Then the second week of their college careers began with 9/11. All three were galvanized by these two generation-shaping crises. Our son Ian began writing political hip-hop music. He spent a semester at the American University in Washington, D.C., working in an inner-city school. During the next election he worked for John Kerry on his college campus--in the fateful state of Ohio. He and all his siblings, along with the rest of their generation, might have been excused for abandoning politics forever before they finished growing up, watching the unstoppable Bush and Cheney break our country and our world for the past eight years.
Thank God for vibrant youth. I watched resilience unfold among our children and their friends, and among the seminary students I teach. A decade before, the entering students were rightly called the “me” generation, distinctly less outwardly focused than their predecessors had been, distinctly more buttoned down, distinctly more calculating. But those who entered seminary in the first decade of the new millennium are a new people, the connecting generation. Dual degree students, marrying their M.Div.’s with Social Work, Law, Marriage and Family Therapy; aspiring to serve as chaplains in the hurting military, on college campuses, and in jails and hospitals and shelters; taking their energy to community aid agencies, spending their spring breaks, summers, and intern years as volunteers in New Orleans, in border ministries, in soup kitchens, and wherever need took them. More than we boomers, these have been Kennedy kids, asking what they can do.
Young eyes were on the prize long before Obama announced his candidacy. By then Ian was a Teach for America corps member in a Bronx sixth grade classroom; his sister Claire was completing a social work degree in Louisville; and their sister Emily was becoming a VISTA volunteer in a small coastal community Oregon. Their younger sisters Nellie and Ginny, one volunteering in a domestic shelter and the other pursuing a nursing degree, found their way to the office of Southern Indiana Rep. Baron Hill to work the phone lines and knock on doors. Jesse, at 15, had spent two of his five or six mission trips working in devastated areas of New Orleans. He was buying Obama shirts wherever he saw them and politicking among his friends. The day before the election he wrote a blog on Facebook echoing the themes of Colin Powell’s endorsement, saying, “He is not Muslim, just because his middle name is Hussein doesn't make him Muslim. But, on another note, we need to ask ourselves the question, ‘So what if he was?’”
Three weeks ago we filled the house with local clergy friends and friends from across the river in Kentucky, all denominations and colors to pray for the election, to gather money and volunteerism for a campaign that was thrown open even in Indiana.
And we won. We won. We won in Indiana; we won in the United States; we have begun to win back our tattered image around the globe; we won the hope of our young people; we won for all the tears and prayers and sufferings of minorities and immigrants in our country and people abroad. We won back our hopefulness. We won a chance to begin healing all that has been battered. Our economy, our military, our environment, our health, our generosity, our leadership, our openness, our future. Our Americanism.
Yesterday I met a man digging a ditch in Scottsburg, Indiana, a white man in a small town in a red state. The residents of the door I knocked on were registered Democrats but brushed past my efforts to ask them to vote. But the man who had been digging around a water pipe for two days next to their front porch stopped me. He said, “I’m thirty-five years old, and I voted today for the very first time. So did my wife. So did my mother and father. We are excited about Obama. We are ready for a change.” Joe the Plumber, meet Larry the Plumber, registered voter.
John McCain’s speech last night was almost as moving to me as Barack’s. Recognizing what a corner we had turned, he preached unity and cooperation. I pray that Obama will indeed be president for a whole nation. For all who have suffered personal tragedy from the unjust war, the merciless economic policies, the brutish foreign policies, the arrogant environmental policies, the perverted ethics, the immoral vision, I pray resurrection. For President-elect Obama I pray wisdom as he assembles his team and plans his plans, brilliance in leadership as in the campaign, courage in the face of overwhelming challenges, strength to overcome both temptations and oppositions, vision to channel the commitment and momentum of all who have been inspired, and all who will yet be inspired. May the new millennium begin all over again, this time with liberty and justice for all.
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