For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to feel it. I knew what it was with a certain sense of clarity and pride. It was the feeling of rebirth and renewal as we washed away the remnants of an old epoch, setting into motion a new one to be conceived in our imaginations and in our hope. Perhaps it was the way that the words “change”, “hope”, and “progress” truly became symbols that finally stood above us as beacons of light shining its red, white, and blue into the skies washing away the blood that stained our previous canvass, effortlessly sinking their way into the deepest parts of ourselves, parts of ourselves we thought were reserved only for our deepest cynicism and pain.
It stood bright in front of our eyes, making us believe that we can, speaking forth that we could, and prophesying that someday we will.
For so long I felt disenchanted with the country I called myself a citizen of. For so long I felt cynical towards its policies and arrogance, It’s greed and selfishness. It was so easy to get swept up in the anti-establishment of what our country bore unto itself with its love of war, racism, sexism, and the pride that usually acts as precursor to the end of every empire before us. In this lack of memory a callous began to develop into our collective consciousness, a sort of despair rising over us like a dark cloud shielding us from the ability to hope, to believe, to live. Lost in the confusion we somehow believed we were the ones trying to cure the world, that we no longer felt the throbbing pain of a sick world trying to tell us that we were the very illness that it needed to be cured of.
And yet on that night, when the world witnessed the beginning stages of what could be something different, it broke through into our imaginations, found its way into our consciousness, and took hold of a belief that we knew to be there all along, we just couldn’t find a way to access it. The belief that if we work together, we will build bridges across a broken land, that if we speak together we will break though the silence, that if we strive for peace we will no longer be enslaved by fear. That night, we were given a glimmer of hope to believe if we were to chose to take it.
It also came upon me in a heap of weight. In a heaviness that bore its weight upon our shoulders, as we realized that we were no longer exempt from bearing its meaning and its manifestations, no longer free to believe it stood for nothing. No longer able to fool ourselves into apathy. It yelled into our ears, shouting its past achievements, begging us to remember its former reincarnations; Lincoln, MLK, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and many more that were martyrs to be remembered on this night. That night, It made us remember and we remembered.
That night, as we became history, we were given the chance to rewrite our own. To move into action, making right the things that have gone wrong. Our story is still being written, and we are only at the beginning of a new chapter.
