I stood in the voting line in Harlem at 118th Street
and Malcolm X Boulevard on Tuesday morning and watched a small boy react to
his mother's disappearance into the polling booth. She had just asked the
poll-watcher's help because, she explained, "I've never voted before."
The boy looked apprehensive as the curtain closed behind her and I encouraged
him to follow her in.
"You'll be glad you did," I said. "This is history being
made today. You'll never forget this."
He looked at me with the expression a child often has when he doesn't know
what to make of a stranger. Beside me an older woman looked across at the
boy, who might have been six years old, and added, "Not only that
- this means maybe someday you can be President."
Around me the sound of murmurs rose in assent. It
occurred to me that I had not been so surrounded by African Americans since
attending a church service in Arizona a few years ago, and this felt a
bit like that church to me, with an unspoken prayer in the air. The convocation
of voters in Harlem was unprecedented, as several had told me. They had
never seen such lines of voters here, ever.
So now we know how it came out: the "unthinkable" for some, but
much dreamed of and hoped for by many others, punctuated at the end by
President-elect Obama's reiteration of his battle cry, and a reminder and
encouragement to any who would listen and respond:
"Yes, you can."
As he repeated it at the end of his post-balloting speech on Tuesday night,
I felt chills to think what it might mean if taken up in all its implications
around the world.
"Yes, you can."
As a young college graduate I worked with delinquent and disadvantaged
youth in Massachusetts and once heard a social worker say "a young
person cannot aspire to a future they can't imagine." I believed it
then and now. Obama's imprecation made me think about all the aspiration
that might be liberated in the world by his election. What if every young
person - whether of color or not - who grew up under a sense of oppression
by caste or class or race, could now imagine... "Yes, I can."
What might they aspire to do?
Well, the answer must be: whatever the question suggests to you and however
it touches your desire and will. The new US president has appeared as living
proof that he could, a man of 47 whose father was Kenyan and mother American,
and who as a youth was fatherless, and footloose, but was aided by the
love of good people, and propelled by the earnest application of his mind
and heart and the purposeful determination to succeed.
What if we could multiply all those young people, everywhere, by newly
imagined possibility and the levels of aspiration it will conjure up? What
might then be possible? And what more might be possible if the US reclaimed
its moral leadership in a world desperate to make the most of every individual's
talents and efforts.
I keep thinking about this, with a sense of hope, and I asked the question
over lunch to a fellow banker, who also sees America's place in the world,
and the world itself, shifted momentously by this election.
"What might be possible?" He smiled at the
question.
"More than twice what you're thinking,"
he said. "Whatever it is."