The Whole World is Watching and Holding Its Breath

Today I had lunch with a man who joined Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department back then. He helped to draft the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This gentleman friend is almost twenty years older than I am, so during our lifetimes, there were still men and women living in the United States who had been born in bondage; they had been slaves.

When he helped write the Voting Rights Act, he never imagined that tomorrow he would be voting for an African American man for president who has a good chance of winning.

I spoke with my daughter this evening. She is a college student studying in Prague for the semester. She has already cast her ballot for Obama. She called me while she was filling out the absentee ballot so that we could share her first vote together just as she and I had shared most of my voting from the time she was about two or three until 2004 when she pressed the lever for Kerry although Bush won.

At first, she was furious with me for voting for Obama in the primary.

"Your whole life, " she rebuked me on the night of Super Tuesday, "you have wanted to vote for a woman. How could you not vote for Hillary."

I told her I voted for Obama because I believed that he could change the tone of election politics, end the era of Lee Atwater and lies, I believed that he could engage young people in civic life, that he could attract men and women whose faces might look different, but who wanted to make the United States of America a proud citizen of the planet.

She was still really angry at me that night.

Just now, just tonight, she told me she understood why I had supported Obama all of this time. She understood that Obama had indeed changed the tone of the election, that he never went into negative, he never attacked character, he never tried to divide.

He offered us ways to heal.

My friend Rebecca who works full time, has three adult children and two grandchildren, a husband, too, and who has been traveling to Pennsylvania on the weekends to get out the vote, asked me the other night: What are we going to do after Election Day?

We are going to make this happen, this real collaboration, this real community that includes everyone.