It's late at night here in Austin, and I've just settled into my hotel room downtown. My second time ever in Texas, I am here to call and knock on doors for a campaign -- but not just any campaign -- a movement. And like all movements, once you realize that the stirrings of your own heart don't belong only to you but to an entire generation, it has you.
Some warn that all this enthusiasm is setting us up for disappointment. President Obama will not be perfect, he won't usher in a golden age, and he won't make everyone happy. This is true, but it's also missing the point.
Obama is here to lead us, not save us. It is our time, not his. The movement is not about him; he is simply the face of it. And he knows it.
"I'm asking you to believe," reads his central message. "Not just in my ability to bring about change in Washington... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
This movement is about all of us who are ready to believe in our own sense of empowerment again. It's about fulfilling our desire for own renewal and transformation. It's about our willingness to work for it.
This is why I became a precinct captain in California, calling and knocking on the doors of neighbors and strangers, asking them to get involved in a process I never believed in until now.
It's why I took the risk of offending my own faith community and shared my political conviction with Sikh Americans who traditionally back the Clintons.
It's why my best friend and I stayed up all night before California's primary making 300 hand-written notes to tell our neighbors why we support Obama, only to jog through suburbia at 4 in the morning delivering them on front doorsteps, hoping they would sway just one undecided voter on election morning. (We won our precinct).
It's why I wept when I punched his name on the ballot. It wasn't his name on the ballot; it was mine. It was the name of all of us who are in this movement together.
And this movement is the reason why I accepted a place at law school this fall. I am beginning to believe again in my own power, and I'm not alone.
I saw this tonight when I stopped by campaign headquarters downtown, a loud cavernous office filled with rows of people on phones, with laptops, sitting beneath hand-painted signs with messages of hope. Colorful chaos with order and purpose.
"You know what I'm dreaming of?" I heard a field organizer say. "Sleep."
She's been traveling with the campaign ever since she graduated from college last summer. Others are still in college, on leave. And I remember taking time my own leave from college after 9/11 -- to document stories of hate violence against my community. What a different moment this is. It is not a moment of tragedy that is defining these college kids, this generation, but a moment of hope.
This hope is shared by all generations, I was reminded when talking with my father tonight. He is a life-long Republican who temporarily switched to the Democratic party just to vote for Obama in the California primary.
"You know, I was thinking about it and figured out I could do something from over here," he told me, in epiphany. "I could make calls! Can I help you make calls?"
It's been a big enough deal for my dad and me to want the same person to be president. Now working together to get him elected... this is getting to be too much.
"That's what's so amazing about this campaign," a friend told me in response, "watching so many different people come together. I wish I could be there in Austin with you," he said.
He is a turbaned Sikh American who canvassed neighborhoods for Obama in New Hampshire.
"You know, I never felt fully American until I knocked on those doors and talked to people," he said. "It really makes you feel part of a community." A democracy. A country. That's what it feels like.
That's why I'm here.
No matter what the outcome. This campaign has already changed us.
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