First Person:
By Ernie McCray
Ahh, hope fills the air that I breathe, as I move, light and easy, like a river dancer on a cloud that’s floating in a gentle wind, as Bob Filner becomes my mayor and Barack Obama my president, again.
It’s a nice high I’m in, hallucinogenic, with music, Sam Cooke singing, “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.”
Oh, it feels so good having a couple of guys in high places who view what people have worked towards for years as earned “benefits” not “entitlements,” and see unions as who they are, “We the People!” Not “bandits.”
But my city’s major rag, the U-T, is feeling just the opposite of me. They supported Carl DeMaio for mayor and Mitt Romney for the presidency, two men who seem to have absolutely no ties with the world in which I reside.
They live in luxury surrounded by a whole lot of people who, like them, think conservatively, an approach to life that works out splendidly for them and I hang out in a reality that’s so rich in diversity I can’t help but think idealistically with my soul and heart wide open. I mean there’s a little of everybody surrounding me. What’s sad is these fat cats ignore my world and its pursuit of the American Dream with an uncanny kind of ease.
I never got to know their nominee, DeMaio, and I’m a man on the go. But, Bob Filner, he’s my friend, my bro. I’ve high fived and bear hugged that dude for about three decades or so. He’s everywhere I go: at marches in the streets, at rallies in our parks, at the border and at our universities in behalf of the homeless, people of color, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. If there’s a gathering around issues of justice and peace, you’re likely to find both him and me. So much of my joy springs from seeing my city finally evolving into what, for fifty years, I’ve wanted it to become, a city run by someone who I can relate to politically. Fifty years! Please excuse my tears of ecstasy.
And that Mitt Romney they wanted to send to DC? He calls me a deadbeat. So he could never serve me. Or anyone like me.
But, in this rapture that has a hold on me, I see a smiling Sam Cooke smiling down on us and again he reminds us: “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.”
It’s like I’m sitting on a perch on a hill and everything is still while a candle light shines on the dark places in our society, a little glow, struggling to stay lit as if it’s in the path of a hearty breeze, so we, collectively, can see our way to better ways of being.
And the change comes to us through a new generation that is rising, lifting itself high above the thinking of any previous era America has ever been witness to.
Barack Obama was chosen in part by young people of a wide range of colors and creeds; people whose brunch with friends isn’t threatened by a man marrying a man or a woman a woman; people who know the news before it makes the news; people who see the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump for the pompous and hateful lumps of humanity they happen to be; people who recently started asking “Why?” carrying signs signifying “Occupy!”; people who have Asked Jeeves and googled and observed and learned the intricacies of their world through gadgets and technologies that have taken the concept of questioning to unimaginable degrees; people who know now, more so than any of the people who came before them on their family tree, how co-opted our democracy is by a category of the rich and powerful that represents a menace to our human fraternity – the greedy.
Some of the change has already come because no matter how hard the media of San Diego tried to sway them otherwise, voters went to the polls and rejected a mayoral candidate’s coldhearted attempt to bring unions to its knees, and turned a deaf ear to a presidential candidate’s lies and philosophical inconsistencies. And since learning begats learning who knows what they will eventually come to do and see.
We can now help the president do what’s needed to make our country a beacon in a world of unreason. We can help him keep habeus corpus alive as the Bill of Rights prescribes. We can help him revise our nation’s drone war policies. We can help him focus on the sins that plague our inner cities. We can help him cease the tortures, the wars, the ignoring of international laws, generally. We can call on our collective ingenuity to create J-O-B’s beyond Mickey D’s and stimulate the economy.
I know more changes are gonna come and it would be nice if the San Diego Union-Tribune came along and joined the fun of helping our new mayor and our president define the change that Sam sang of. They could play a pivotal role as we ponder more and more how our nation can contribute to the making of a better world in a spirit of love.
But it’s up to them if they want to keep on trucking. The change is irreversible. Oh, it makes me giggily.