I Am Overwhelmed

I have so much to say about last nights election but I can’s get the words out. I am simply overwhelmed with Obama’s victory. As a Citizen of the World, I know things will be so much better than they were under the last Administration and as a Canadian, I am happy that my American neighbours will soon be able to hold their heads up proudly when they travel and quit pretending to be Canadians!

If someone had told me that in my lifetime I would see a Black Man elected President of the USA, I would have laughed at them. This is a once in a lifetime event and my feelings are similar, I am sure, to what they would have been had Bobby Kennedy lived to become President.

There are tens of thousands of Heroes responsible for this momentous occasion and we should take a minute to remember them. They are the children who braved the menacing crowds to simply walk into their schools, the people who dared to sit at the Zellers lunch counter or to take their seat in the front of the bus. They are the workers who marched peacefully into the fire hoses, police dogs, night sticks of the "authorities" and the bullets of the KKK. They are the white volunteers murdered for helping Blacks to register to vote and they are leaders like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King who were murdered for expressing the dream of the possibility of what took place last night. They are the thousands of young people who got their friends, family and neighbours out to vote last night.

Martin Luther King’s Dream is still far from being fulfilled but it is now a bit closer. He has peeked over the Mountaintop and has glimpsed the fulfillment of his Dream but he has much further to go. We all have further to go and more work to do.

Obama won all his constituencies except uneducated white males and seniors. Not much can be done for the first group but I think it is time for us seniors do some serious thinking. As for this senior, I do not want to be lumped in with the first group!