I did not stay up for the speeches. I waited. I just now watched Obama’s acceptance speech.
Not a victory speech. An acceptance speech. There is a difference. He hasn’t really won anything. Yet.
I cannot remember the last time I felt a tingle run through me at the words of someone with a vision. I always listen with a salt shaker at hand. But my word, I felt it this time. I am cautious, but just maybe we will see something new.
To all those who have already declared themselves ready to oppose Obama and all he stands for, to the Limbaughs, the Ingrahams, and the Hannitys: you are small souls, stunted in imagination, and cynical in disposition. You have lost the ability to imagine. You cannot set aside your aversion to change, or your denials of hope for the time it takes to find out if someone may be honest and honestly intended. You are the Ellsworth Tooheys, the James Taggarts, the Joseph McCarthys, the Pat Buchanans, and your role models are Timothy McVeigh and Oliver North and, iconographically, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick. You so cherish your power to sway people with charred words and bullying bombast that you cannot do the one thing that an Obama quite legitimately asks—set aside differences, come together, work for a future. You have decided in advance that you do not wish to live in that future, that its shape and size and the decor of its rooms will not suit your taste. And if it turns out to be a fine future, well-furnished and abundant, you ahve already decided that the people who will live in it do not deserve it. The maggots of cynicism have shredded your minds and there is no redemption for you from without. You must save yourselves, but please, don’t do it at our expense.
I wonder truly just what it is you fear. What is it you think you will lose?
Maybe you’ll figure that out as time goes on. Or maybe we will, and learn to live without you. You are, in the words of Milton, Blind Mouths.
Kindly stay out of our way.