"My Lord, I feel something is happening"

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/03/pittsburgh/


"My Lord, I feel something is happening"

Volunteering for an inspired Obama campaign in Pittsburgh, I couldn't help feeling that politics is being reinvented.

By Jonathan Alford



Nov. 3, 2008 | PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- I am sitting at a call table at a Barack Obama campaign office with churchgoing black ladies. We are in East Liberty, a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh. The office sits on the same block as the county assistance center and a liquor store. Out on the street, old men are drinking out of paper bags and young kids are hanging out on the corner, watching a steady stream of volunteers with clipboards and Obama signs pour in and out of the office.

I am a 53-year-old white piano player and postal carrier from Oakland, Calif. I knocked on doors four years ago for John Kerry in swing-state Pennsylvania and just had to come back for Obama. This time, though, something feels different. The hubris of Bush and the neocons has brought about an inevitable backlash, and the ideological glue of the conservative movement has begun to melt. Evangelicals are beginning to embrace environmental and social issues and a few more working-class whites are coming back to the Democratic fold. Politics feels like it is on the verge on being reinvented.

Although a lot of the staffers at the East Liberty office are young and black, most of the volunteers are middle-aged black women. We are taking a break and chatting. Angela asks me if I watched "that Obama TV show" last night. "My Lord, I feel something is happening," she says. "I just want to throw up my hands! You know who we should be praising? We should be praising Barack's mama! She said he was born for greatness and she led him to it and believed in him."

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It does seem like a dream to see a black man speaking in front of such a wide cross section of America. "Our opponent says that there is a real America," Obama continues. "But I am sorry there aren't a real America and an unreal America. Soldiers in the trenches don't ask each other if they are red or blue. You can support the war and be a patriot, and not support the war and still be a patriot. We are tired of these old divisions and ways of separating Americans from each other. We are all Americans and what we share is greater than what divides us."

The big hall, reverberating with shouts and applause, feels small and connected. I am not sure I have ever said this: I am truly proud to be an American.

I leave the arena after the rally and join a stream of people walking through the Hill District to their cars and the bus lines. The Hill is the setting of many of August Wilson's plays chronicling the black experience. Poor and black, it figures in some of his plays as a metaphor for the intransigence of racism and the difficulty of change. I walk down its streets, past the old brick tenements, boarded up and derelict. Coming down after the high of the rally, people seem quiet and reflective. I stop and ask some of them what they thought of the event. With great pride, they all say the same thing. "I had to be here. I had to see history."