(An email from Charlie Dee. To call him a longtime Milwaukee activist doesn't begin to do him justice, but it will have to suffice. -- Xoff)

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Anne and I were sipping drinks, talking excitedly to friends, surrounded by a huge multi-racial crowd in the grand ballroom of Milwaukee’s HyattHotel.  We had that feeling of euphoric happiness that doesn’t come often in life: maybe the birth of a child or a wedding. 

All day, as I taught my class, phoned citizens to make sure they had voted, and checked polling places to call back voting totals to Obama headquarters, I couldn’t stop thinking of the day Nelson Mandela was released from his South African prison: joyful shock that I was experiencing this moment in history.

The celebration the Obama staff organized was perfect.  There was a stage set up but no speeches allowed.  The only use of the stage was by euphoric Obama volunteers holding banners, dancing wildly, or byphotographers getting wider shots of the crowd.
 
However, the stage was flanked with huge flat screens on either side that displayed CNN.  All the while, recorded music was piped through the sound system.  My attention was diverted from whichever conversation I was in a couple minutes after 10:00 PM by a cheer. I looked up a bit confused and saw on the screen that Virginia had gone to Obama.  I was throwing my arms around Anne, shouting, “That’s it!” when another, more
massive roar hit us, we looked up, and the screen flashed the banner that Barack Obama was the next President of the U.S.

I’m not capable of adequately describing the euphoria, but I’ll try.  I grabbed Anne, and we both sobbed.  People were screaming, crying, hugging all around us.  The music started back up with Obama’s theme song by Stevie Wonder, “Signed, Sealed and Delivered.”

As my friend Ed Garvey wrote in his blog on  FightingBob.com, “This was personal.”  I got interested in politics not out of love but rather hate.  I couldn’t stand the pictures of southern sheriffs and police unleashing their German Shepherd attack dogs on Blacks marching peacefully for civil rights.  When I saw the eyes of the racist whites screaming hatefully at Black children trying to enter southern schools, I was instantly engaged.  It was impossible to be neutral.  I knew which side I was on.

So my tears were not out of delusion that Obama would be some sort of savior.  I know full well the obstacles he’ll face accomplishing what this country needs.  I have no illusions about the flaws of our system, the resistance of the powerful to giving an inch, or the fundamental conservatism, yes conservatism, that marks Obama’s political style and substance.

My tears were for the movement that was sparked by Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat for a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus and the heroism of the hard working Black citizens of that city who for the next 16 months walked to and from their jobs – long distances – in their boycott that finally halted the Jim Crow segregation of those busses.

Yeah, my tears were personal.  Obama is a compelling figure by any measure.  But I was crying joy for our movement that started a few years before he was born but that made this night possible. History is made by common people, but it’s made so slowly that we’re usually not aware we’re making it, and when we stop to think about it, it’s so easy to focus on the defeats. 

But Tuesday night, November 4, 2008, was a rare moment that the universe gives back to us saying, “Here, you’ve been doing the correct things, you’ve been fighting the right battles, you helped bring this about.  Enjoy it.”

And the party got wilder.  You can see pictures on Anne’s website, www.threadingwater.wordpress.com.  We danced to “Signed, Sealed and Delivered” and whatever else was played.

There had been wonderful moments all day.  Even though I had voted two weeks earlier, I was compelled to walk into the French Immersion School where I normally vote to sense the ambience and claim the “I voted” sticker for my shirt.  Later in class my students and I secured one more vote, I don’t know who for, by cajoling the one student who claimed she didn’t have time between class and her job to vote, into taking the first conference with me on her paper then leaving class early to vote before she went to her work.

At one of the polling stations that I gathered numbers from, the lawyer sent to observe by the Obama campaign was an acquaintance, the son of Romaine, one of my English Department colleagues, long since retired. Fifteen years ago I heard numerous stories about her precocious if not prodigal grandson and on this election day was able to ask about the perfect Jonathan and hear from his dad that he was now a leader in the College Dems at Columbia University and totally engaged in progressive politics.  So Grandma Romaine had not been exaggerating.

Then at the party, one of my former students came up and tearfully hugged me.  She said that she had become so cynical before she took my Vietnam class that she had given up politics as a waste of time and energy, but my class had inspired her to become active again, and Obama’s victory was the reward for her changed attitude and hard work.

Any of you who are teachers, on any level, know that we exist for such moments and love our profession so much because no matter how infrequently they come, they sustain us for months.

When I turned around from Kerry, a big guy was sticking his hand out, asking me if I remembered him.  I didn’t until he said his name, Arno.  I’ve only had one Arno as a student.  He walked into my summer school composition class about eight years ago with every inch of his visible skin filled with tattoos, many of them vile. He was a recovering skinhead who wrote rambling narratives that I helped him fashion into essays about his recent life as a neo-Nazi, white supremacist who beat the hell out of blacks and gays as a righteous cause.

His wife had dumped him, leaving him to care for their little girl alone.  One day at a Milwaukee playground, he read while she played, but looked up after a while to see her with two black kids.  He leapt to his feet to save her from “the other,” only to be stopped in his tracks by the visceral recognition that she was incredibly happy in her color-blind reverie.  He let  her play continue and described, in his essay, that moment as initiating a six month period of self evaluation that led him to fight his  way out of his gang and transform his life.

Now, on election night, not a hint of that exorcised obsessive anger soiled his beaming face as he celebrated an African-American president. He even has an agent and publishers interested in the memoir he’s writing, he proudly announced after our hug.

John McCain’s concession speech was initially greeted with some boos, but those disappeared as he communicated a graciousness that had never appeared in his campaign.  When he referenced Booker T. Washington being invited to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, even the folks ordering drinks quieted down.  Imagine, a Republican mentioning the struggle for racial equality.  Our movement has had more impact than we thought!

When McCain mentioned Sarah Palin, the boos renewed, this time much louder, but I shouted back, “Don’t boo her, thank her.  She was a gift!!”

Obama’s speech had everyone in tears again and set off another round of hugs, shouts and wild dancing. I wanted to call everyone I had ever worked with, marched with or tried to explain the diversity and schizophrenia of the U. S. to.  I haven’t re-read that speech because I want to stay away from analysis for a few days and just sustain this feeling as I long as I can.  I want to “play the high” as a hippie friend described it to me in Boston in 1969.

On the way home, Anne drove home via Wisconsin Avenue, the main street through downtown where parades start and end, and triumphs have historically been celebrated.  She honked the horn while I waved an American flag and shouted to people on the street, “YES WE DID!!”

But this is still America.  A Milwaukee cop had to pee on our picnic. He pulled us over, upset that we were – get this – making too much noise by honking our horn!!

Good thing Anne was driving and didn’t take the bait when he acted like he was doing us a favor by not giving us a ticket. It must not have been as big a night for him as it was for us.

Once the high is over, we’ll get back to work.  La Lutte Continue.