“But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been
anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible
odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't
try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a
simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can.”
-Barack Obama, New Hampshire 2008
There are dozens of recaps and impact analysis stories on yesterday’s historic health care reform vote in the House so I’m not going to do that today. I am ecstatic that affordable health care is now a right for all Americans. This is what change looks like and is exactly why I voted and worked so hard to elect President Obama.
Instead I’m going to tell a story about why I care so much. Those of you who believe in fate or even dumb luck might appreciate it.
I’d never been to Iowa before, yet there I was, freezing my ass off in the December arctic cold in front of Des Moines International. I was waiting for my new boss who had invited me to a customer call to assist in my ramp up. That’s typical for life in sales, August worldwide sales meetings in Arizona, or winters in Chicago or Des Moines; it’s never South Beach in January. The company we visited were not good prospects but we were flying out the next morning and they were really nice guys, so at the end of the call we invited them out for dinner. They declined, a Democratic Presidential candidate named Barack Obama was speaking at a local high school and they wanted to go hear him. After some education on how seriously Iowans take their civic responsibility we could only accept their invitation to join them.
At this point I have to admit that I was seriously unhappy with this turn of events. I was cold, there was no sale, and I wasn’t going to get a cocktail to soak my miseries with.
As corny as it may sound what happened next literally changed my life forever. It wasn’t the speech itself, which was a combination of his red state-blue state speech from the 2004 Democratic Convention and his Iowa victory speech. This was the first time I’d ever heard a politician speak without depending on personal pronouns to carry the point. The speech wasn’t about him or the shiny new job he wanted to get his hands on or how he was going to single handedly make my life better because he was so great. The speech was about the people in that gym and it was about personal responsibility and accountability and perseverance and accomplishment in the face of the longest odds. It was about the failures of cynicism and the power of hope and what could be accomplished if Americans would stand up and work for change, because we must, not selfishly, but on behalf of each other.
For my entire life I equated my own personal success with wealth creation, with hustling to get ahead and get by. I had escaped the ghetto of my childhood and never looked back. At that moment I realized that I learned all the wrong things, and that I’d lived my life in a very shallow and meaningless way. Now I feel very strongly that if all I do with the balance of my life is to create more wealth in order to create more distance between myself and where I came from, I will have failed miserably.
I was 39 years old the day I voted for Barack Obama in the Georgia Democratic Primary. It was the first time I’d ever voted in my life and looking back I have a lot of guilt associated with my non-participation in our government, especially considering the Bush 8 years. Understand though, where I come from parental guidance was a daily lesson in what not to do and politicians only pandered in my neighborhood during the closest of elections only to disappear again the day afterwards. In my eyes, and in the eyes of my community, voting was a privilege reserved for downtown people, rich people and more specifically, rich white people and so I never wasted my time or my energy on voting. The only thing registering to vote got you was jury duty. I was wrong.
Those nice Iowans I met that day took their responsibility seriously because it is. Elections matter. If President Obama has taught me anything over the past two years its that one person CAN make a difference. Perfect isn’t achievable, waiting is untenable and ambivalence, in the way I was, is inexcusable. But if we each get up and try to do only what we can, great things can be accomplished.
“When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenge -- we overcame it. We did not avoid our responsibility -- we embraced it. We did not fear our future -- we shaped it.”
-President Barack Obama, White House 2010