Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Cedarville University, Christianity, election, God, Obama, Politics, religion
On a brutally hot day in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama visited a blue-collar town in the Appalachian mountains. That town is my town, and I was there to hear him speak. My friends and I had waited in line for hours, and sweat had glued my shirt to my back. I hate waiting in line. I hate getting up early. But I held out, and when I finally walked into that high school gymnasium I realized that the wait had been worth it.
You have to understand where I come from, and what kind of family I have. I am from the South, and I am the direct descendent of slave owners. In fact, my family still has the ledger with the slaves’ names, ages and prices. We are not racists any more, but that is my history. It is the history of many Southerners. There is a reason why Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in the South, and it is not because the South is an open, tolerant place.
Years of hearing racist jokes from my classmates and years of watching the Confederate flag displayed in pickup trucks had not prepared me for what I saw in that gymnasium. The South had come together. The gym was equal parts white and black. I never had any hope that I would ever see such a thing but on that day, I did.
The coal miners sat beside the residents of our low-income housing complex and cheered. As for me, I was busy absorbing the scene around me. I am a cynical person, and I boast a healthy distrust of politicians. I’d supported Barack Obama before he came to my hometown, but that morning convinced me that there was something unusual about this campaign. Obama had done what no other politician had been able to do. He had brought us together.
Fast forward to my return to campus. The reaction to Obama was what you’d expect from 3000 conservative Christians. I had my salvation questioned. I was called ignorant and foolish. I was told that Obama was the Antichrist, and I was told that even if he wasn’t the Antichrist his government would lead to the end of the world.
And do you know something? It already has led to the end of the world. The world as we know it is changed. It is over. And I believe that is a very good thing. Last night, I attended an Obama party thrown by a campus organization called P.E.A.C.E Project. It was the rowdiest party I’d ever attended. There were McCain supporters there, but they were there to support us. No one criticized anybody else. I saw people dance with complete abandon. I saw people with tears running down their faces. I heard a McCain supporter apologize for not understanding what Obama’s election meant to us.
We had been brought together again. Of course, this second time was not just Obama’s doing. God was there that night. And while I doubt he has a political affiliation, I think He was content. On that night, the descendents of slaves and the descendents of the men and women who had owned them danced together.
If I ever have children, and if those children ever ask me about this election, that is the story I will tell them. It is the story that warms me in spite of the insults I hear from ignorant people. It is the story that, for a moment, brought me frighteningly close to patriotism. It is the story of a people, and how they fought, and how they won.
Congratulations, President-Elect Barack H. Obama. Don’t let us down.
Filed under: College, Politics, Real Life | Tags: Bush, College, conservatives, Goeglin, Iraq, Politics, war
This week has been utterly exhausting. Scratch that; this entire semester has been exhausting. In high school you’re told to work your ass off, get into the good college. No one tells you that if you do get into the good college you will most likely suffer a complete mental breakdown before the age of 21. The stress doesn’t just come from academics. It comes from a bizarre diet of caffeine, pizza and chocolate. It comes from the gastritis caused by said bizarre diet. It comes from your love life (or lack of one, in my case). It comes from a thwarted desire to get the fuck off campus (I don’t have a car). It comes from the mental list of all the things you have yet to do (laundry, vaccuuming, school, sleep, school, school, feed Betta, more school, repeat until graduation day). I always wanted to go to college. I had no idea that doing so would destroy the lining of my stomach as well as what emotional stability I have left from high school.
In more interesting news, I got to talk to Tim Goeglin, Special Aide to the President of the United States. He spoke in chapel (why, I don’t know) and held a question and answer session afterwards. He had some decent things to say, especially in regard to having a woman president. He’s very much in favor of a diverse White House. However, he also claimed that America ‘was the greatest nation in the history of mankind.’ I asked him to defend that assertion without resorting to the defense that America is a Christian nation. His answer avoided that exact terminology, but in classic political fashion he merely couched it in different words. I lost track of how many times he used the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.’ I also found it interesting that when asked about the war in Iraq (I believe the exact question was, “What do you have to say to those who say the war in Iraq is a mistake?”) he began by listing each recent attack against American assets. He gave an exact number of the American dead in each situation. Allegedly, he did this to show the cost of war. However I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t mention the innocent Iraqis and Afghans killed in the war that responded to those attacks. It seems to me that if one wishes to calculate the true cost of war, one should pay attention to everyone that died.
Goeglin also claimed that Bush is ‘a great man’ and asserted that history would most likely regard him as one of the greatest president America has known. I found that to be amusing. I also found it amusing that he claimed that Constantine built the Hagia Sophia. He was attempting to prove the greatness of the Christian religion (by talking about a big church?), but his argument would have been much more affective if he’d gotten his facts right. Justinian and Theodora built the Hagia Sophia. The very name of the church is Greek. Constantine was a Roman. Yes, I’m an anal-retentive history nerd, but these things matter to me. I wonder if he realizes that the Hagia Sophia was eventually turned into a mosque.
Probably not.
