This doesn’t feel real. An African American president?
I’m at home, sick with a cold, alone in bed with my laptop, and the road outside my window is all quiet. There are no cars going by. There are no children outside running around cat-calling. The television is off. But I can feel my own pulse beating off of my pillow.
What was it like when Martin Luther King Jr was shot? Or, when JFK gave his speech; or when he was shot? Watching those moments of history in archive footage, I often wonder what it would be like living in one. I sometimes think the moment must have been loud, and rattled the globe like an earthquake. And I always wonder what I would have done, or felt, in those giant moments in history.
Well, I feel like I just witnessed one of those moments last night on television. I was tearing up listening to that speech. It was powerful. I kept pausing my mind, looking at myself listening, trying to snap-shot the moment in my head; believing I was actually listening live to a sound byte that will be heard over and over again for generations to come.
What a day, the next morning. It’s all quiet. I feel for once, proud again to be American, and for once, proud to be a minority. I suppose I have an idea now how I might have felt were I around witnessing a moment of history. I think I would have felt a lot like I do now: in pains to describe it.